


Scale and Artifice

by chimeraproblems



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: Alcohol, Body Horror, Cyborg Feelings, Dismemberment (offscreen), Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Kaiju, Monster sex, Rivalry, Size Difference, a tank named Fighting Girlfriend, casual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-24 06:31:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21333787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chimeraproblems/pseuds/chimeraproblems
Summary: After the events of WBaWC, Keiki Haniyasushin approaches Yachie Kicchou with an intriguing proposition: she will make her a physical body. A story about rivalry, bodies, violence to liberate, and unionizing the afterlife.
Relationships: Haniyasushin Keiki & Joutouguu Mayumi, Kicchou Yachie/Haniyasushin Keiki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	1. Beast City Overture

Yachie Kicchou, matriarch of the Kiketsu family, stood at the lakeshore and looked at the vessel. It drifted lazily between the shore and the keyhole-shaped island of the Primate Garden in the center of the lake. In the wake of the Keiga family’s disastrous invasion of Hell, an uneasy detente had settled over Tiragyoni Metropolis. Any new development — such as a boat appearing overnight — had the potential to upset that balance. What little of the barge’s hull that sat above the waterline looked to be of glazed ceramic, and it stood out against the island’s treeline behind it. It supported a lavishly-furnished deck, though at the moment its tables and cushions sat empty of all occupants save two. One of those occupants waved to her.

Yachie swished her dragon tail in agitated consideration. Her instincts told her it was a trap. Her intellect told her that there were far more practical methods to trap an enemy than building a pleasure barge to distract them. Her pride, flattered by the absurd hypothetical, hungered to spring the trap just to humor her nemesis. Perhaps Keiki Haniyasushin had simply wished to  _ build a boat. _

In the Beast Realm, all motives were ulterior. Yachie smirked and took flight over the waters. An invitation from Keiki gave her the opportunity to show off. She wore a sharp pair of black satin slacks with a waist high enough to accommodate her tail. Above it, she wore a pastel teal silk button-up with tortoiseshell cufflinks. Around her neck was a snakeskin necktie. Slung over her shoulder and shell was an embroidered satin suit jacket. The heels of her snakeskin cowboy boots clicked smartly on the deck of Keiki’s barge. If she was here to crash a party, she damn well dressed to the part.

“Oh!” said Keiki, sitting at a nearby table. She lifted a fruity cocktail in greeting. “Welcome aboard, Yachie!”

Even amidst her luxurious surroundings, Keiki still wore her usual garb of flowing layers beneath a potter’s apron. She kept her voluminous blue hair under one of her collection of cloth wraps. There was always a presence, a solidness to her that Yachie found challenging. She lived for challenges. Yachie made her way closer across the deck. Standing at attention in full regalia behind Keiki, Brigadier General Mayumi Joutougu tightened her grip upon the hilt of her sheathed sword. Her hollow, critical stare bored into Yachie and created an amusing contrast with the easy, open demeanor of the goddess she served.

“That’s very gracious of you,” said Yachie. She turned a chair to the side and joined the Idola Deus at her table, crossing her legs and leaning back on her tail. “It’s been some time since we’ve met like this, hasn’t it?”

“Too long, too long,” said Keiki. She smiled pleasantly. “Would you care for something to drink? Everything’s freshly stocked.”

“I’d like you to impress me with a neat scotch,” said Yachie.

“Oh, well I hope our selection is up to your standards,” Keiki said. “Mayumi, dear, could you oblige? I trust your judgement.”

“Of course, Miss Haniyasushin,” said Mayumi. She saluted and, with a parting glare at the Kiketsu family matriarch, began marching to a nearby wetbar.

“Please, just call me Keiki!” called Keiki. She sighed. “Honestly, it’s the one order she can’t seem to follow.”

“Did you invite me here to show off your new boat or to criticize your subordinates?” asked Yachie, smiling coldly.

“It’s a lovely boat, isn’t it? I’m awfully proud of how it turned out. No, the reason I invited you over was simply to extend a neighborly proposition.”

“And what might that be?” asked Yachie, leaning forward languidly.

Keiki sipped her cocktail, then returned Yachie’s slitted gaze. “I’d like to build you a body.”

Yachie blinked, first with her nictitating membranes, then with her eyelids. This was quite the elaborate trap. “A physical body?”

“Yes.”

Yachie shifted slightly to better display the cut of her dress shirt and how it accentuated the physique of her spiritual form. “Is there something wrong with my current body?”

“Not at all,” said Keiki. “But wasn’t that the crux of your strategy when you brought those humans down here? The means available to you as a beast spirit fare poorly against my sculpting arts. I’m offering you more means.”

Mayumi returned and set a low tumbler of scotch in front of Yachie. The matriarch let her attention flick to the Haniwa General. She had a similar sort of presence to that of her nemesis, but it was tempered, subdued. At the core of it was that same tangibility, that same physicality. Keiki simply layered a mantle of divinity over it. Was that the sort of body Keiki intended to build for her?

“How do you like the scotch?” asked Keiki.

Yachie sniffed the glass warily, then sampled it. Strong, with a taste like a memory of flame. It was quite good. She wondered briefly how Keiki had acquired such an exemplary specimen. Yachie set the tumbler back on the table and inclined her head in an appreciative gesture that was half nod and half shrug. “It’s adequate,” she said.

Keiki smiled sweetly and turned to her general. “Mayumi, drink her scotch.”

In a blink, Mayumi snatched the glass and tipped it to her lips. Yachie’s chair clattered to the deck as she stood and dug her claws into the linen tablecloth. “So, you invited me over to insult me?” Yachie growled, wisps of fire flickering at her forked tongue with every syllable.

Keiki remained seated. “Mayumi, what sort of notes do you get from the body of that spirit?”

Mayumi’s hollow eyes waltzed in thought. “Smoky. It was aged in sherry casks heat-sealed with juniper and peat. There’s a bite thanks to the juniper, but the sherry casks enhance the malt. Afternotes of… leather?” She sniffed. “I will be honest, Miss Haniyasushin: scotch is not my drink.”

“Well, that’s quite alright. Please pour Miss Kicchou another scotch, will you, Mayumi dear?”

Mayumi looked warily at the seething Yachie and opened her mouth as if to speak, then reconsidered. She backed away across the deck, breaking her vigil only momentarily to make sure she didn’t run into any deck furniture between her and the bar. Keiki took another sip of her cocktail.

“Oh sit down, sit down, please,” said the Idola Deus. “Be honest, how much of that did you glean with that body of yours?”

Yachie remained standing. She slowly released her claws from the tablecloth, though her face remained locked in a serpentine snarl.

Keiki continued when she sensed no response was forthcoming. “Did you ever taste scotch when you were alive?  _ Were _ you ever alive, or did you claw your way into this purgatory from out of the morass of human fears?”

Doubt, envy and curiosity eroded the bulwark of Yachie’s wounded pride, but still she faced her nemesis from atop its unblemished crenellations. “Is there anything you humans won’t cage?”

Keiki laughed softly. “A body isn’t a cage, my dear — at least not one I’d build you. It’s a home. Surely you must have sensed something along those lines from those humans. I won’t force you into anything, of course.”

Yachie scoffed. Fury still boiled within her, but it boiled in an arctic sea of context. Despite all of Yachie’s power, her strength, her influence, her command of the Kiketsu family and all the cunning that required, Keiki Haniyasushin existed within a metaphysical framework that rendered all these boons strategically moot. Worst of all, she had sealed the lowly human spirits of the Beast Realm inside her idols, rendering them inaccessible to the Kiketsu and the other clans. And she spoke of not forcing her.

Mayumi returned with a fresh scotch and set it before Yachie before withdrawing to stand guard behind her goddess once more.

“Forgive my skepticism,” Yachie growled. “But what do  _ you _ gain from this?”

“Why, the chance—” Keiki’s aura flared about her as she gestured expansively with her cocktail glass. “—to  _ create!” _

Yachie barked a laugh. “That’s all? Mask your duplicitousness better, wicked god.”

Keiki let her aura dissipate as her expression softened. “Has the Beast Realm so warped you that you take altruism for wickedness?”

She stood from the table and smoothed out her apron. Cocktail in hand, she strode to the railing that looked out across the lake to the half-light of the metropolis. After a moment, Yachie took up her scotch glass and followed. Mayumi trailed at a polite distance. Purgatory breezes rustled through the Primate Garden’s trees behind them and gave fitful life to the litter on the distant wharf before them.

“I’ve always respected you, you know,” said Keiki at length. “Far more than the other leaders and warlords of the Beast Realm. I do apologize for teasing you.”

“It went a bit beyond teasing, don’t you think?” asked Yachie pointedly.

Keiki nodded behind her. “Well, dear Mayumi hasn’t keeled over from poison yet, has she?”

Yachie snorted. “You have an infuriating way of showing respect.”

Keiki turned to her and balled her fist excitedly. “Oh, but what do you think this offer is? I look at you and I think — I can work with this! I can work with  _ you! _ I  _ want _ to work with you!”

Yachie smirked. Honeyed words to mask that the Idola Deus wished to place her under her power. But then, perhaps Keiki  _ was _ expressing her genuine sentiments. “So it’s all for me, you say. You really want to work for me?”

“ _ With _ you, darling. The distinction is significant, I feel.”

Yachie laughed. “Keiki Haniyasushin. I am Yachie Kicchou, matriarch of the Kiketsu family.” She brushed her free claw past Keiki to grasp the railing next to her. Keiki looked up at her with a sudden color to her tanned cheeks. Yachie draped her tail around the railing behind her. “When you work with me, you work  _ for _ me.”

Keiki lifted her glass between them. “A toast, then?”

Yachie grinned, showing her viper’s fangs. She clinked the scotch tumbler to Keiki’s cocktail glass. “To a joint venture.”

———

Keiki led Yachie deeper into the halls beneath the Primate Garden. Cryptic, humming machinery flanked them, each surface glowing with sigils and occult diagrams. Yachie’s mind worked feverishly to catalogue the internal layout. It was one thing to humor Keiki under the open sky. But to allow herself to be lured into the lair of the Idola Deus? It still seemed an insane gamble contrary to her every instinct. But then, Keiki’s guards and generals were nowhere to be seen — it was surely a gamble for her as well.

“I loathe what you’ve done with the place,” Yachie rumbled.

Keiki glanced over her shoulder and pouted. “It has its own appeal, doesn’t it? I like being able to moderate humidity levels.”

Yachie grunted. Humidity had never particularly bothered her one way or another. Was this truly a concern for the embodied? Did it justify how thoroughly Keiki had reshaped the once-natural caverns that honeycombed the island’s depths? Their splendor was all but extinguished, paved over with more monoliths of artifice.

“What if I put in a water feature?” mused Keiki.

“Easy enough in the middle of a lake. You could break a few retaining walls and let nature reclaim this place.”

Keiki made as if to respond, then stopped herself mid-thought and pulled a small notebook from her apron. “Ballast tanks,” she muttered, never breaking stride as she jotted down her idea.

“Ballast?” Yachie found it difficult to follow Keiki’s logic. She kept analyzing her every word and their immediate surroundings for indications that she was walking into a trap.

“Once an idea comes to me I’m always loathe to let it go. I keep them in here until I’m ready to tackle them.” Keiki smiled back at the matriarch and then stored her notebook once more. Yachie’s instincts practically screamed, but she met Keiki’s innocent smile with a mask of practiced disinterest. The goddess gestured ahead. “We’re almost to my workshop.”

The hallway opened into an airy vaulted space the size of a factory. The space was lit in part by more of the glyph-etched monoliths that clad the walls and in part by a complex of kilns that dominated the far wall. Tool-strewn workspaces, throwing wheels, slip troughs, and dozens of contraptions whose purposes Yachie could only guess at filled the workshop floor. She tried to conceal her awe and trepidation. Keiki could craft an army from this room. Keiki  _ had _ crafted an army from this room. This chamber was the birthplace of the Haniwa Soldiers and the accursed idols that locked the human spirits beyond Yachie’s reach.

Keiki turned and led her to a living space kept apart from the foundry floor by a few cloth partitions. Strings of fairy lights tempered the industrial glow. The sculptor gestured to a comfortable-looking chair and slipped behind the counter of a simple but well-furnished kitchen. Yachie remained standing.

“Coffee?” asked Keiki, rummaging for the means to brew it.

“Thank you,” said Yachie. “You always try to push comestibles on me.”

“Once you’ve got a body of your own, you’ll be even more grateful for it,” Keiki winked. Her smile faded slightly at Yachie’s obvious discomfort. “Yachie, darling, please try to relax. I promise your safety.”

“What do you think your word means to me?” Yachie cast an appraising glance around the goddess’s living arrangements. It was a surreal cross-section of domesticity within the edifice of a goddess of utter isolation.

“Oh, Yachie.” Keiki paused a moment to feed coffee beans through a hand-cranked mill. “If you can’t trust your nemesis, who  _ can _ you trust?”

“You can at least understand my discomfort,” said Yachie, flicking her tail in irritation.

“Of course! And in return I’m simply asking you to understand my position.” Keiki emptied the mill’s grounds drawer into a filter and fished a kettle from her stovetop. As she spoke, she brewed the coffee into a pair of hand-crafted mugs. “I am extending you my hospitality. The sentiment is deeper than humanity, but nevertheless, it is a sentiment that humankind has codified and made sacred in countless ways, through countless cultures. If I were to betray that guarantee, then my worshippers, my constituents, my charges — they would never stand for it. And how could I blame them?”

“You’d brook such insubordination?” Yachie smirked.

“Is that how you see it?” Keiki took up the mugs and brought them over. She gave one to Yachie, then pulled a stool away from a nearby drafting table for her seat. “They called me here. Their suffering was the foundation of my mandate. Their deliverance remains my most ardent aspiration. If I act in ways that are unworthy to them, I lose that mandate. They return to suffering.”

Keiki savored her coffee. She made no show of it save for what naturally accompanied a practiced ritual. Yachie allowed herself to accept Keiki’s earlier invitation to sit. The coffee was bitter and sharp. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Keiki was getting more out of it than she was.

“Then I shall accept your hospitality,” said Yachie. “I have no interest in fighting you in the center of your power.”

“Oh? I would’ve thought you’d be thrilled to plumb my sanctum looking for weaknesses.”

“I don’t have to fight for that.” She smiled coldly to mask her racing thoughts. That was the damnable thing, of course. What weaknesses? There was nothing here Yachie could leverage.

“That’s no fun,” Keiki pouted.

Why had she  _ really _ invited Yachie into her sanctum? On her barge the other night she had claimed that she worked best in her own space. There was certainly truth to that — not just the drafting board behind Keiki, but the rest of her living arrangements and the foundry around them spoke of routine and dedication. It all looked well-used and solidly-maintained. But regardless of the fact that Yachie found nothing to exploit, why would Keiki expose herself to this tremendous potential vulnerability?

Keiki finished her coffee, then met Yachie’s gaze. “The truth is, Yachie, I’m lonely.”

Could it really be something so mundane? “Don’t you have your General? Your underlings?”

“Oh, Mayumi’s a darling,” said Keiki. She ran her hands gently around the empty mug in her grasp, as if subconsciously recalling the movements that had shaped it on the wheel. “But of course, I made her that way. There’s always a part of me, deep down, that knows exactly what she’s going to do. I want  _ surprises.” _

Yachie leaned forward, partially in interest and partially to reposition her tail an armchair that wasn’t designed with tails in mind. “And you want me to surprise you?”

“You always do. Last time was so thrilling! Those humans you found — their strength, their elegance, their danmaku — I’ve never felt such excitement since I was beckoned here!”

Yachie laughed. “The ones who cut a swathe through your armies and shattered your idols at the behest of us beast spirits, you mean?”

“Yes! My goodness, I never would have expected all of that. You’ve always been such a schemer, my dear.”

“Thank you,” said Yachie. She rested her head on her hand. “And you still want to build me a body? No strings attached?”

Keiki smiled brightly and cocked her head. “Precisely.”

“There’s nothing guaranteeing I won’t simply use it against you.”

“Frankly, I’m counting on that,” Keiki laughed. “We’ve nearly completed the reconstruction from your last attack and I need things to do with my hands.”

“Like building me a body.”

“Oh, yes,” said Keiki. “The reconstruction efforts are all retreading old work. It’s meditative in its own way, but I’m afraid I crave novelty.”

Yachie let her tail flick against the armrest. “I’m novel, am I?”

“Of all of my adversaries in the Beast Realm, far and away you are. Say I made a body for that thickheaded pegasus of the Keiga? She’d just come at me head on until it broke. I’m exhausted just considering it. Or say I made one for Toutetsu of the Gouyouku?” Keiki sniffed distastefully. “Well, the less said about  _ her _ , the better. But  _ you, _ darling...”

Yachie puffed herself up a bit, flicking her tongue out idly. “What  _ about _ me?”

Keiki drew her legs up under her and leaned forward on her stool. “Well, it’s simply that I can’t wait to see what you’ll do when we’ve leveled the playing field between us.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Yachie rumbled. “What’s the next order of business?”

“Pull up a stool! Let’s spitball a little.” Keiki set her mug aside and turned to the drafting table. Yachie took a stool from the kitchen counter and joined her.

“Now, the obvious move,” said Keiki, stealing glances back and forth between her guest and her drafting table as she began to sketch, “is to simply model it after you directly.”

“You’re modeling me? One moment—” Yachie clasped her clawed fingertips at her dress shirt’s top button. “—May I?”

Keiki chuckled softly. “Forward, aren’t you? I like that in a rival. Go ahead.”

Yachie undressed, confidently and casually. She set her clothes on the coffee table and settled back on the stool. It was fascinating to watch Keiki work. Yachie stilled herself almost subconsciously as her portrait took shape in gestural outlines. “Sometimes the obvious move is the right move,” said Yachie. “I imagine it would be easy to adjust to.”

“I would imagine so too,” agreed Keiki. There was a certain wistful tone in her voice. “Could I get your profile, dear?”

Yachie turned her head obligingly. “You’re the expert here, aren’t you?”

It was hard to read Keiki’s expression from her peripheral vision. The goddess sighed. “Only at making them. I can make educated guesses and inferences from their construction, but the real meat of it — of living in them? I can only imagine.”

Yachie laughed coldly. “And you’re stuffing me in one of these? How gracious.”

“I’d test it myself if I could, darling!” Keiki made a spinning gesture with her free hand. “Turn around? I’d like to trace out your shell patterns. Honestly, I envy your potential. Your… mutability.”

Yachie turned her back to her nemesis and cast a glance back over the rim of her shell. “My freedom?”

“Call it what you like. ‘Freedom’ is such a loaded term down here. Your shell is very intricate, I must say. It must take quite a bit of power and effort to maintain such intricacy.”

“It does.” Yachie smiled to herself. With her back to Keiki, there was little to focus on but the details of Keiki’s living quarters. There were a good deal more creature comforts than Yachie kept in the headquarters of the Kiketsu. Perhaps that would change with a body.

“That should do it,” said Keiki. Yachie turned back to the drawing board.

It was a breathtaking likeness for how swiftly she had rendered it. There were Yachie’s shapely muscles, her wicked claws, her sleek, serpentine features. Every last whorl of her shell and scale of her tail. Yachie allowed a hint of appreciation to slip into her voice. “Not bad, for the obvious choice.”

“Thank you,” said Keiki. “Now, of course, we aren’t limited to this.”

“Not limited?” Yachie mused. She gasped. “Bigger!”

“Bigger!” echoed Keiki triumphantly. She switched to a new sheet.

“Tail! More tail!” A body it wouldn’t take metaphysical effort to sustain? A body with  _ no limits? _

“More tail!” Keiki pumped her fist as she sketched furiously with her other hand.

“— _ Bigger?” _ asked Yachie.

Keiki nodded. “Scales?” the goddess offered. “Like everywhere, scales?”

Yachie rested her chin on her claw in consideration. “What sort of texture and firmness do we have available?”

Keiki made a broad gesture. “As pliant as clay, or as unyielding as tempered ceramic.”

“Well, then smooth and strong, but—” Yachie flexed her claws in demonstration. “—with a nice squish still, you know?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Everywhere.”

Keiki ran a hand up an unseen plane in the air that intersected vertically with Yachie’s body. “What about a different texture up your front? Along your underbelly, so to speak. We extend it from your tail.”

Yachie blinked languidly in consideration. “Extended ventral scales? They would have to be just a bit more—” She flexed her claws slightly deeper. “You know?”

“I believe so. What’s your tail like right now?” asked Keiki.

Yachie wrapped her tail around herself and draped it in her lap. She squeezed her claws around it in demonstration. “To me, it’s satisfactory. This is the sort of texture I imagine.”

“May I?” asked Keiki. Yachie nodded her permission and extended her tail to the goddess. It was the strangest sensation, when Keiki’s living fingers pressed into her tail —  _ through _ her tail. Like an unknown temperature raced at lightning speed through her form. Keiki jerked her hands free. “Terribly sorry. I’ll have to go by visual cue.”

Yachie recovered her composure swiftly. “I suppose that’s part of why you’re doing this, isn’t it?”

Keiki nodded. “Precisely. Don’t fret, your visual cues are quite informative. Now, the face. Not that there’s anything wrong with what you’ve made for yourself, of course. It’s quite fetching. But I’ve always wondered—”

Yachie cocked her eyebrows and inclined her head to indicate that the goddess continue.

“—You look awfully human, don’t you think?”

It was remarkable how Keiki could deliver the most incisive, probing questions with such a natural nonchalance. Yachie sighed. “What you said on the boat the other day, about clawing my way to existence from the sea of human fear? There’s some truth to it.”

Yachie stood and began pacing. She spoke again when her back faced Keiki. “Their fear — human fear — I find it fascinating in its complexity. Among the animal fears, it can crystallize around such esoteric vectors. So many of those vectors originate from stressors they inflict upon themselves. Curious creatures, your subjects. In some ways I have allowed their fear to shape me. It is… easy.”

“Fascinating,” said Keiki breathily. “For sustenance? Stability?”

“Yes.” Yachie could sense another question forming itself within her nemesis.

Keiki’s pencil scratched to fill the silence until she spoke next. “You’ve allowed this parasitic dependency to mold you and yet you call it freedom?”

Yachie whirled, snarling. “And what do you know of freedom? You, who have trapped your own worshippers within your accursed idols! You, who have made them slaves of dependency!”

Keiki set down her pencil and met Yachie’s reproachful gaze. Her aura kindled faintly around her as she spoke. “What did the human spirits have in the Beast Realm before I heard their pleas? Afterlives of horror, predation, and isolation. I built them vessels to protect them from this. How can one be enslaved to the means of one’s own liberation, Yachie? Is freedom to you merely the freedom to be exploited, the freedom to be prey, the freedom to be alienated from your own corporeality?”

Yachie clenched a claw before her. “It is the freedom to strive, Keiki! The freedom to survive and prove yourself the fittest! That is how it has always been in the Beast Realm!”

“What a dreadfully tedious philosophy to base an afterlife around.” Keiki sighed. “Well, I can clearly see how it’s shaped you, and I’m sure you can see that too. I’ve never pegged you as one too hung up on propriety. I’m simply asking this, darling. How would you like to shape yourself?”

Yachie unclenched her claw. Her regard traveled from the goddess to the fanciful design that graced her drafting table. She grinned, slowly and sharply. “I would like that very much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mayumi got a promotion


	2. Vessel

Yachie sat at a low teak table in the Kiketsu family headquarter’s primary meeting room, the nerve center of her empire. To her right, a wall of glass windows offered a commanding view of Tiragyoni Metropolis nearly as good as the view from her penthouse and private quarters on the floor above. The room’s sparse decor served to guide focus firmly back to Yachie’s seat. It was the only seat in the room, for the animal spirits that served her had little use for chairs.

Yachie had always considered her headquarters to be refined and understated. Now that she had seen the clutter and liveliness of Keiki’s lair, however, Yachie entertained the slight doubt that she had surrounded herself in austerity for no real end. She banished the doubt to return her focus to the task at hand. Sitting across the table from her were her three most trusted lieutenants.

“I’ll keep this brief,” said Yachie. “After she approached me with an offer, I commissioned several physical bodies from Keiki Haniyasushin, the Idola Deus. I anticipate the first of them will be completed for my occupancy shortly. Should it be built to my specifications as she has promised, it will give us a considerable edge over the Keiga and the Gouyouku and allow us a foothold in our operations against the goddess of the Primate Garden.”

“What?” sputtered Masu. She was a dependable gharial spirit adept at the day-to-day logistics of running the Kiketsu family. When she sputtered, one could nearly feel it from across the room. “Boss, that’s crazy! How do we know this deal’s on the level? For all we know, she’s gonna trap you!”

Yachie crossed her legs and leaned back slightly in her stool. “Her motives appear to be genuine, but it is a possibility I cannot and will not discount. Should the need arise, the most prudent course of action would be to enlist someone from the realm of the living to break me from the trap. Iwashi, of the humans who helped us last time, who do you anticipate would be the most likely to assist us again?”

Iwashi was the most junior of her assembled lieutenants, but was swiftly proving herself to be a resourceful and adaptable addition to her ranks. It was she who had traveled to the human realm with a wolf lieutenant of the Keiga and an eagle lieutenant of the Gouyouku to bring back human warriors to stand against Keiki and her idols. The otter spirit’s whiskers twitched in consideration. “Hard to say, Miss Kicchou. The magician has visited the Beast Realm several times since our operation, but largely to visit the Primate Garden. Seems like Keiki is cozying up to her quite a bit. The shrine maiden and the Netherworld swordswoman seem largely sedentary. We’d have to kick up a considerable ruckus to get their attention again, and there’s no guarantee they’d fall for it a third time.”

“See, boss?” said Masu. “It’s too risky!”

“In my assessment,” rumbled Yachie, “the potential benefits far outstrip the risks, Masu.”

“Iwashi. What about money?” asked the third of her lieutenants. Uni was a grizzled sea otter, and one of the oldest and most steadfast of Yachie’s supporters. Her de facto second-in-command played a fishbone toothpick between the digits of her paw.

“Ah,” said Iwashi. “Well, all the humans seemed fairly mercenary. They would most likely be highly responsive to bribes.”

“Should the need arise, expense is no factor,” said Yachie. “Of course, there’s no need to advertise that.”

“I still don’t like it, boss,” said Masu.

“Your objection is noted and overruled, lieutenant. It’s  _ my _ body, or it’s going to be. Now, are these contingencies understood?”

Her lieutenants nodded.

“Good. I anticipate we’ll hear from Haniyasushin shortly. You are dismissed.”

Iwashi and Masu drifted from the room. Uni lingered a moment, appraising Yachie with her one eye. Yachie met the sea otter’s gaze and raised an inquisitorial eyebrow.

Uni grinned around her toothpick. “Caught a fancy for her, then?”

Yachie chuckled and found herself returning the grin. “She is a worthy adversary.”

A soft chiming filtered in to them from the secretarial station outside as the two made to leave the meeting room.

“What is it?” Yachie asked the marmoset spirit secretary.

“Ah! M-miss Kicchou, I didn’t want to bother you while you were in a meeting,” stammered the secretary, more flustered than usual. “D-down in the entry hall, that is, they just called up — uh, t-the Haniwa General is here and she’s asking for you.”

“Excellent. Hold my calls until I’m next in headquarters. I may be some time.”

With a parting nod to Uni, she descended to the lobby. Even before she reached the entrance hall, Yachie could discern the palpable strain Mayumi Joutougu’s presence put on the atmosphere. Kiketsu underlings lounged about the lobby’s shadowed recesses with an affected and utterly unconvincing nonchalance. Mayumi looked impatient more than anything.

“So good of you to join us, Miss Joutougu,” said Yachie as she entered, stretching her arms in an expansive gesture.

Mayumi sniffed distastefully. “Miss Haniyasushin requests your presence.”

“And she sent her Brigadier General to deliver such a simple message? Times of peace, eh?”

“You invaded Hell not three weeks ago,” said Mayumi.

Yachie strolled past the Haniwa officer towards the exit, shouldering a suit jacket mid-stride. “The  _ Keiga _ invaded Hell. Do you mean to blame us for every shortsighted blunder of the affiliates within our short-lived little alliance?”

Mayumi fell in next to her. “Miss Haniyasushin requested that I escort you to the Primate Garden.”

“Oh? And what’s the good news?” They stepped into the bustling streets of the afterlife’s metropolis. Passers-by gave the matriarch and the General a wide, respectful berth.

“The first of your bodies is complete. She wants you to test it. I’m sure you guessed this.”

“Hm,” Yachie laughed in brief, cold satisfaction. She scanned the crowded streets with an analysis so practiced as to be nearly subconscious. It left the majority of her attention free to turn that same impartial threat assessment to Mayumi. The Brigadier General had come alone. Her discomfort was obvious, but it was a discomfort that most likely stemmed from the company she had been tasked to keep. Yachie had never known Mayumi to employ subterfuge. The Haniwa officer was far more threatening in her capacity for military-scale violence — a capacity she had presumably left at home.

So why  _ had _ Keiki sent her? The goddess’s motives were inscrutable as ever. The two walked in uneasy silence under the stifling city breeze. Several blocks from the Primate Garden, a thought came to Yachie.

“What was it like when she made you a body, General?”

Mayumi turned her hollow gaze to the matriarch. She clearly had little skill in masking her emotions. There was wistfulness in that gaze, sincerity and anger. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Mayumi. Was that a hint of jealousy within her?

“Well! Glad to see we’re tempering expectations.” The more Yachie considered it, the more likely it seemed that this line of questioning was precisely why Keiki had sent her most trusted officer to fetch her.

Mayumi’s gaze still bored into her. “I simply don’t understand — and I pray Miss Haniyasushin forgives my doubt — what  _ you’ve _ done to merit this boon from her.”

_ You’re not enough for her, _ Yachie wanted to say. She bit back the barb — baiting a warrior as fearsome as Mayumi without a body to defend herself with was tactical suicide. “Oh, she hasn’t told you?” Yachie teased. “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

They drew to a brief halt at the shores of the Primate Garden’s lake. Mayumi spoke in a hushed tone that echoed with a terrible promise. “I know exactly how a body of your own could let you hurt Lady Keiki. I know how this expands the threat you represent to us. Don’t think for a second I’ll let you harm her.”

Yachie gave a disarming smile with a sincerity so practiced it was indistinguishable from genuine emotion. “Frankly, even  _ I _ don’t know how this expands my threat to you. It seems fun, my dear General. That’s why I’ve taken her up on this lark.”

Mayumi simply glared. Her hand remained upon the hilt of her sword.

“Well, you must have a busy schedule,” said Yachie. “Why don’t I see myself in? I know the way.”

“Miss Haniyasushin specifically requested that I escort you to her sanctum.”

“Very well, very well.” Yachie made an after-you gesture towards the island. “Lead the way.”

———

The kilns roared. Even from halfway across the workshops, Yachie was aware of the heat as a vague sense of warning within her spiritual senses. Keiki was hard at work.

“Yachie!” said the goddess. She stood from a pottery wheel and wiped the sweat from her brow with a sleeve, heedless of the streaks of clay it left in her hair and skin. “Delightful to have you, as always.”

Yachie nodded towards Mayumi, doggedly following the matriarch. “Your General made it sound like attendance was an order.”

Keiki smiled as she rummaged in her workspace for a rag to wipe the clay from her hands. “Did she, now? And you followed it anyway.”

Yachie ignored the faintest snort from Mayumi and ran her free claw through the ends of her undercut in a preening gesture. “I’m expecting big dividends. My time isn’t cheap, you know — I cleared my schedule for this.”

“Good!” said Keiki. “There’s always a period of adjustment and calibration and every spirit takes to it differently.”

She led them to a central space within the workshops. Counters and workstations had been cleared to make room for a wide circle of glowing glyphs and arcane geometry traced in the floor. At its center was a seated figure. A burlap covering obscured its details, but certain features were clear from the way it draped: the peaks formed by a pair of antlers, the curve of a shell. Keiki strode to the figure’s side.

“What is a body?” asked the Idola Deus.

Yachie hesitated at the edge of the circle. She could sense the power thrumming within its perimeter, seductively attuned to her spirit.

“A home?” offered Mayumi.

“A tool,” rumbled Yachie. “You have your own answer, I’m sure.”

“Neither of you are wrong,” Keiki winked. Lit from the magic circle beneath her and the kiln’s fires behind her, she struck an eerie sight. “A body is a vector for self-expression. It is the means through which we affect material change upon the world. It shapes our selves, it colors our interactions with the other, it channels our cognition even as it determines its nature.”

The goddess grasped a fistful of burlap. “The bigger ones are still in the kilns. This one, I hope, will simply help you to be more… you.”

Keiki whipped the cloth away. Yachie’s eyes widened. Propped up and leaning forward in what looked like a massage chair was a perfect simulacrum of herself. It was uncannily beautiful. Lifeless. A wrenching pang of yearning shot through her as she regarded her empty self.

“It’s…” Yachie stepped into the circle. She stretched a hand forward, half in caution and half in wonder. “... How?”

“Well, not to brag,” said Keiki, running her filed nails over her apron, “But it’s all in the hands.”

“How do I…?” Yachie circled closer. There was almost a gravity to her empty body.

Keiki slid her hand over the back of Yachie’s claw. She held it steadily and precisely such that Yachie’s spiritual body never entered phase conflict with the corporeal form of the goddess. Keiki guided Yachie’s claw to the exposed back of her empty body’s neck. There was a slight gap where the rim of her shell met the skin of her body. Within that gap, as their hands approached, a glyph kindled to life.

“As I said, It’s all in the hands.” Keiki paused and let her hand fall from Yachie’s claw to the bare shoulder of her waiting body. “Simply touch that glyph.”

Yachie looked over her body, then at the goddess standing on its other side. When Keiki met her gaze, unbridled excitement shone back at Yachie. She could read not a trace of duplicitousness in that gaze — a deep cynicism within Yachie nearly wanted to ask her for tips. This was her last chance to back out.

Yachie touched the glyph.

Energy crackled up her arm and awareness blossomed out from her touch. New sensory information flooded her mental bandwidth. She felt herself wrenched towards her body but as her spirit crossed the threshold of the entry glyph it poured forth in a deluge, flowing into every corner and recess of her body. Filling herself. There was a brief moment of metaphysical displacement that she recognized as the last of her spirit transferring into her body. The feeling transitioned seamlessly and effortlessly into—

Relief. Warmth. Pressure — touch.

Keiki’s fingers resting on her shoulder. Her steady touch recalling every movement on the wheel and the slab that shaped this body. Yachie’s body. She took a breath. Her vision resolved from vague brilliance into the glowing geometry and clutter of Keiki’s sanctum. The heat of the kilns radiating behind her felt delightful on her scales. As she explored her own expanding senses she found there was even a subtle taste to her own mouth. She wanted something new to taste.

“How is it?” Keiki’s voice. The subtle vibrations and overtones it gained with a body to play through.

Yachie lifted a claw. The way the meat of it — the clay of it? — reacted when she funneled her will through it. Yachie clasped her claw over Keiki’s hand — the warmth of it! — and pulled that hand to her own cheek to feel the heat mirrored within it. The life.

Was this the vitality, the strength, the presence that Keiki saw in her and sculpted into this body? Was it always a part of her, just waiting for the proper medium to express it? Yachie laughed and felt the way delight shook her body. She loved the way her own voice resonated within her. Keiki’s fingers stroked her cheek.

“Flattery,” said Yachie, lifting herself from the massage chair’s bracings, “will get you  _ everywhere.” _

She still stood taller than Keiki. The goddess’s presence now challenged Yachie in an entirely different flavor than the challenge she had posed to her as a disembodied spirit. Now Yachie was exceptionally embodied. She released Keiki’s hand. The goddess made no move to withdraw her touch. Yachie reached forward and brushed her claw over Keiki’s cheek, reciprocating the touch. She wanted to pull her closer and feel more of her entrancing warmth. She felt that same want mirrored in the goddess’s touch.

Yachie drifted closer. Keiki met her. Many things struck Yachie from the first kiss of her new body. There was the undeniable softness of Keiki’s lips. There was the taste of her mouth, a new taste. There was the subtle awareness of every muscular process within the kiss itself. There was the  _ warmth. _

Then there was the pinprick of pain at her neck. Yachie glanced to the side to find Mayumi’s blade pressed against her with untiring precision.

“Keep your hands to yourself,” said Mayumi. Her voice was as level as her blade.

Yachie pulled back glacially. She darted her tongue out, tasting the sanctum’s air and Keiki’s earthy scent. She turned her gaze back to the Idola Deus and saw the blush on her cheeks and the mischievous gleam in her eyes. “I’ve always wanted to see the look on your face when I did that,” Yachie rumbled. She let her own satisfaction saturate her every syllable.

That put a dent in Mayumi’s composure. “Your arrogance — Miss Haniyasushin?”

“It’s quite alright, Mayumi darling.” Keiki was laughing. “I do apologize, I’m simply remembering a certain Lance Corporal stammering out ‘Forgive my impropriety, Miss Haniyasushin!’ after what  _ she _ did when she first got her body. Or was it ‘impiety’?”

“I—” said Mayumi. Her cheeks flushed a more vivid tone than could be accounted by the kiln’s fires. She sheathed her sword and looked away. “I am  _ nothing _ like her.”

Mayumi turned and marched away. At the circle’s edge, she shot a parting glare back to Yachie. “Savor this,” Mayumi said, and left.

“She’s so protective,” Keiki chuckled, watching her general depart her sanctum. Her voice was tinged with pride and fondness. She turned to Yachie, and zeal eclipsed her fondness. “But my goodness! You’ve taken to it so quickly, so adeptly! Tell me, how does it  _ feel? _ Are there any dead zones?”

Yachie levered herself away from the chair and took a tentative step. There were matters of balance to contend with now, between her tail and her shell, but the weight and distribution felt entirely natural.

“Everything feels as it should. It’s… marvelous.” She ran a claw down the front of her body and savored the tactility. “... Thank you.”

Keiki laughed. “A genuine compliment? Now I know I’ve done well.”

Yachie bent, and with a steady concentration she collected her clothes from the floor where they had fallen from her spirit. She was in no particular hurry to garb herself again but the act of collection gave her a chance to test her coordination. “This body is incredibly responsive. The way it translates my will into action — well, ‘translates’ is hardly the word. It’s fluent. Natural. You’ve outdone yourself.”

Keiki beamed with pride. “Coffee?”

“You’re celebrating with coffee?”

“Well, to start things, why not? Don’t tell me you think you’re leaving already. You’ve barely arrived and there’s so many things still to test.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Yachie rumbled. She was encouraged by the fact that she  _ could _ consider leaving. Still, Keiki certainly could have found a less harrowing phrasing to extend her hospitality. Yachie stepped from the circle and made slowly for the sanctum’s domestic partition.

“I have just the thing for later this evening,” said Keiki, following attentively. “Last time that magician from the surface visited, I was able to trade her a few enchanted daggers for a bottle of viper sake. Oh, but Mayumi would enjoy that, too.”

“Viper sake?” Yachie turned.

Her tail took the legs out from a worktable next to her, sending its contents spilling across the floor. Pain flared out from the unexpected contact. Keiki braced against her before she could fully lose her balance.

“Yes, it’s aged with a preserved viper, apparently,” said Keiki, her voice tinged with a bit of strain. Pressed against Yachie, the goddess’s presence bled through the soft fabric of her dress and her clay-stained apron. “But perhaps we shouldn’t delve into balance-addling depressants while you’re still adjusting to a new body.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” Yachie grunted. She regained her footing and rubbed her tail soothingly. Despite the pain, the texture of her own scales was entrancing. “Oh, I can’t  _ wait _ for a whole body of these.”

“Ahaha,” Keiki loosed a short, tired laugh as she patted the matriarch on the shoulder. “You have no idea how much work it is to sculpt every single one of those. That’s why the other bodies are still in progress. Why don’t you stay the night, my dear? I could probably wrap another one by tomorrow.”

Yachie ran the prospect over in her mind. “Let me think on it. In the meantime, Keiki, what say we enjoy whatever you fix for us closer to the kilns? I find myself wanting to  _ bask.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the kiketsu lieutenants are named after their favorite fish


	3. Dehumanize Yourself

Keiki Haniyasushin’s couch was not a bad place to sleep. It was well-loved and broken in. With the back cushions taken off, it had enough room to accommodate Yachie’s shell and tail. She had been provided with a very comfortable quilt and enough pillows to keep her antlers from puncturing the armrests. The whole thing smelled, rather distractingly, of Keiki Haniyasushin. Despite all this, Yachie found herself awake.

There was much to consider. If this was how the human spirits felt protected within her idols, Yachie had woefully underestimated not only the powers but the ideals of the Idola Deus. How much of everything she had thought about Keiki’s actions and methods had been extrapolated not from material reality but from sheer resentment? How could she have known, when for her whole existence she had never known  _ touch? _

Perhaps it was the coffee keeping Yachie awake. It was a particular physiological effect she had never had to contend with before tonight. But then, it was only one among many sensations the night had held. The coffee, the lavish dinner Keiki had prepared for them, the music, the dancing (all in the name of calibrations, Keiki had maintained) — they were a series of firsts in a replete evening. The sake had lured Mayumi back to the sanctum and went some ways towards dispelling the Brigadier General’s foul mood. Mayumi downed enough to loosen up but had nursed her cups for the rest of the evening to maintain vigilance. Keiki and Yachie accounted for the rest of the sizeable bottle between themselves. Keiki had a divine capacity but seemed to have reached her desired level of chatty effusiveness. Yachie had the feeling that her body’s own tolerance was similarly fearsome, but she allowed herself to be caught up in the novelty of the sensation. At the end of an evening of rousing repartee, Keiki had set up the couch for Yachie before retiring with her General to the bedroom.

It was… fun. Yachie had  _ enjoyed _ herself. It was an emotion nearly alien from her spirit’s path through the Beast Realm. The absence yawned in her memory like a leviathan roused from ageless slumber. To find joy at last in Keiki’s sanctum was vexing, to say the least. And what a joy she had found in this body! It was so perplexingly potent and the festivities so lively that her spirits were still too high for melancholy reminiscing to occupy her thoughts for too long. She resolved to set aside time to process when she wasn’t trying to sleep on her rival’s couch. But questions still burned inside her.

_ Why was Keiki being so nice to her? _

And Keiki expected her to repay this with more of her schemes, more of her cunning. Was that how you were  _ supposed _ to respond to kindness? Did Keiki simply have that low a regard for her — but if that were true, then why this gift, why this gesture?  _ Why tonight? _

Perhaps it was thirst keeping her awake. Her mouth was dry and uncomfortable, and it was not a new sensation she would rank very highly. She rose carefully from the couch in the gloom. The kiln’s fires were but embers and the cryptic monoliths ringing the walls dulled their glyphs in the idle hours of the night. Already she was accustomed enough to her body to maneuver a living room and a kitchen in the dark without incident. Poised to open the cupboard, she grew aware of a quiet clattering emanating from within.

Opening the cupboard, she gazed into a spectral jamboree of dishware. The minor spirits possessing the various cups and mugs within shimmied with their neighbors in celebration of Keiki’s vessels — the vessels they had come to inhabit. It was almost nauseatingly saccharine, yet part of Yachie still empathized. She reached in the cupboard and a mug backflipped its way into her waiting grasp. She filled it at the faucet. It seemed these tools were just as thrilled to be used by the matriarch of the Kiketsu family as they were by the sculptor goddess. Or perhaps they sensed a kindred tool, waiting to be used?

Yachie stopped at the entrance to the bedroom partition on her way back to the couch. Keiki’s bed was wide; its postered frame was an ornate and canopied affair whose delicate fabrics seemed to flow into the very walls of her domestic partition. Glyphlight filtered through the canopy and made for an ethereal sight in the gloom.

Lying on her back in the center of the mattress, Keiki snored softly. Draped around her and nestled against her was the form of Mayumi, breathing gently and steadily.

Her greatest nemesis in the Beast Realm and her most formidable general were asleep mere paces away and all Yachie  _ wanted _ to think about was the oily sharpness of the viper sake’s bouquet. She nearly scoffed at the thought of what she’d have have given for this opportunity not two weeks ago.  _ Had _ her mind been affected? But no, it felt all too easy to envision what she’d have done. How she might have hurt Keiki. She could clearly still lapse into that mindset.

She simply  _ didn’t want to. _ Was this a test, too?

As Yachie finished her water she became aware of a subtle glinting from the bed. It was, she realized, the glinting of Mayumi’s unobstructed eye, peering at her from over the slumbering form of the goddess. The Haniwa officer hadn’t changed her breathing or shifted in the slightest, but her gaze locked unmistakeably upon Yachie. The matriarch smirked and quit the doorway to bus her empty mug to the sink, leaving the two to sleep in peace. As ever, it seemed the goddess was never quite as vulnerable as expected.

She settled her bulk back on the couch and drew up the quilt. After a moment, she curled her tail forward through her legs and wrapped her arms around it, pressing its soft ventrals against her body. She felt warm and cushioned by herself. It was a supremely comfortable position. She drifted off with an easy smile on her face.  _ That _ was why she hadn’t been able to sleep.

———

“Trust me,” said Keiki, serving out a portion of sumptuous frittata onto Yachie’s plate, “You’re going to want to feed that thing  _ every day.” _

“Even if I’m not in it?” asked Yachie, before taking a bite. The texture and the seasonings were exquisitely delicate.

Keiki chuckled. “Probably not. But regular offerings never hurt, you know?”

Yachie considered her plate. During the day, Keiki’s dishware seemed contentedly dormant. “That begs the question, of course — everything you make comes to house a spirit, yes?”

“Yes, it can’t be helped,” said Keiki.

“It’s on account of Miss Haniyasushin’s dextrous hands,” Mayumi said over a cup of coffee. The Brigadier General sat at the countertop next to Yachie. Keiki served a breakfast portion to her plate.

“I’m sure you know all about those,” Yachie rumbled. Her tease elicited an indignant blush from Mayumi. The matriarch continued. “My question is, what’s there to keep squatters out of any spare body of mine?”

“An astute question, my dear Kicchou,” replied Keiki. She paused for a bite of frittata. The goddess seemed content enough to stand across the counter from her companions in breakfast. “I’ve keyed each of them to your particular spectral wavelength.”

Yachie leaned forward in interest. “Oh? Is it some sort of spell? A bit of programming?”

“Quite a few of both, in fact,” Keiki answered. “ _ Quite _ a few. You should really see the inner workings of one of these. A body’s systematic complexity is as a symphony of interconnected motifs, all in harmony with each other. And of course, beyond that keying is the simple function of design.”

“Function of design? It’s designed to be a body, is it not?” Yachie asked partly out of curiosity and partly to give Keiki an opportunity to enjoy more of her breakfast while it was still warm.

“It’s designed to be  _ your _ body, my dear. Shaped in accordance to your preferences, your experiences, your aspirations, your… desires. Each is specified to you by its very nature. Any interloper would have to feel an exceptional amount of kinship to you to avoid or overcome the potential dysmorphia.”

“What of the bodies that are more… aspirational?” asked Yachie. “Would I be at risk of that same dysmorphia through design?”

“It’s a minor risk. It may be more pronounced during the adjustment period, or may perhaps lead to a longer adjustment period. But ultimately, these designs reflect aspirations that your heart birthed. So long as you still want them, I believe you can adapt to them flawlessly.”

“That damned pegasus Saki is fond of calling me two-faced,” Yachie rumbled, scenting the kitchen’s air with her forked tongue. “Let’s show her just how many faces I can have.”

“That’s the spirit!” Keiki raised a mug of coffee in toast.

Mayumi stood and cleared her dishes, then gave Keiki a salute. “I’ll be out on inspections today, Miss Haniyasushin. Please be careful around Kicchou.”

Keiki kissed her General on the cheek and waved her off. “We’ll be fine, darling. Have a lovely day.”

Mayumi left, rubbing her cheek distractedly.

Yachie finished a long sip of coffee, then gazed with an affect that she hoped read as detached bemusement at the Idola Deus. “But what of your heart? Weren’t these designs birthed in there as well?”

Keiki laughed. “Oh, I could say that in this endeavor my hands are but the conduits to usher your dreams into the material, but… I’d be lying. Of course I’ve infused it with my taste, my style, my judgement. Isn’t that part of the fun? Seeing where our fancies take us in collaboration?”

A dozen barbs and brushing-offs came to mind to reassert her antagonism, her distance, but Yachie found herself unsatisfied with any of them. She flexed a claw idly and said instead, “I must acknowledge your expertise in this. You’ve made such a wonderful thing for me.”

“I’m so glad,” Keiki beamed. “Now, how’d you like to help with the next one?”

———

In the far corner of the workshops, several tables and slabs had been pushed together and ringed with harnesses and cranes. It was an elaborate space constructed to house a monster in pieces. Even incomplete, Yachie’s body in progress was roughly double her present size. Flared scales of unglazed ceramic shaped its head like that of an upsized, antlered bush viper. A trail of wide ventral scales ran from a peak on its neck, down its chest, defining its belly, before disappearing between its legs. Keiki had clearly prioritized construction on the larger and more uniquely-fitted scales, for many sections on the rest of the body were clad only in structural panels whose sockets languished unscaled. A few segments had yet to be fitted with even the structural panels, leaving the skeletal armature and obscure mechanisms underneath to gleam through. Its unattached tail hung in a nearby series of harnesses.

Had it been a body of flesh and blood on the slabs, it would have been a gruesome spectacle rather than merely macabre. But even unfinished, its beauty and potential shone through. Yachie gazed at her next body in entranced fascination. Feelings long dormant stirred within her.

“I hope you can see why I wanted to share this with you,” said Keiki. She rested her hands on her hips in a pose of proud satisfaction.

“You’ve been working hard on this,” said Yachie. She drew closer to the incomplete body and ran her claw over a seam that circled the hip. “This seam here — is it modular?”

Keiki gasped and clapped in excitement. “You noticed! Yes, I thought it would open up quite a few possibilities down the line. Of course, it also means more work.”

Yachie glanced back at the goddess. “Wasn’t that the idea?”

“Yes, yes,” Keiki sighed and met the matriarch’s gaze with a tired smile. “Don’t worry, I know what I’ve signed up for. But this is to show you what  _ you’ve _ signed up for as well.”

Yachie pressed her clawtips against one of the thicker ventral scales that ran down the front but found it rigid and unyielding. The texture was the nearly porous abrasiveness of unglazed ceramic, quite unlike the underside of her present tail. “Hmm,” she said, unable to keep every trace of disappointment from her tone.

“Oh, that’s not its final texture, of course.” Keiki patted her arm reassuringly, then moved to a nearby kiln, donning a pair of insulated mitts. “There’s a certain vitality that emerges through the glazing process. Take a look at these.”

Keiki pulled a tray of raw scales from the kilns. They looked almost like potsherds, save for their near-uniformity. She set the tray down next to the segment of body its contents were sculpted to clad. Taking a pair of tongs, she clasped a scale and flipped it to its underside, beckoning Yachie closer to inspect it. At its wider base was a round fixture to allow it to socket to the panels. Traced around the fixture and over every other available surface were symbols and delicate script in arcane programming. After a moment, Keiki passed a jeweler’s loupe to the matriarch.

“This…” Yachie breathed, “This is on every scale? You’ve worked this into every single one?”

“I’ve fashioned stamps to speed the process along, but yes,” said Keiki. “There are actually several interlocking scripts here. Some, like the spells of tactility, activate when they react with certain compounds in my glazes — your body will always  _ feel _ like a body, even when uninhabited. Others, like the ones that determine sense and pressure and feedback, only activate in the presence of an inhabiting spirit. That is, you.”

Yachie could already feel the fruits of the goddess’s previous efforts with her every breath and movement. Even a glimpse into the process revealed a staggering amount of labor on every level of detail and scope. She didn’t know how to feel. Assuredly, guilt bubbled together with inadequacy somewhere within her, but they struggled against anticipation and enticement.

Above all, Yachie knew she wanted  _ more. _

“There’s something missing,” the matriarch rumbled. She set down the loupe and focused again on the massive body before her. Her gaze and touch trailed down its ventrals until they rested upon an empty space between its thighs.

“Oh?” Keiki followed Yachie’s gaze, then laughed boisterously. “Ohoho! I’m afraid it’s missing on your current body as well. I only built what you gave me to model. I didn’t want to presume, my dear!”

Yachie grinned hungrily. “For the longest time I simply didn’t have the energy to maintain anything along those lines. There were more pressing priorities. But now I find myself wanting it back.”

“It’s such a farce. Everyone down here goes on and on about ‘the ultimate survival of the fittest’ but all along you’ve been missing such a critical component of survival!” Keiki clapped her hand encouragingly on Yachie’s shoulder. “What would you like to  _ breed _ with, darling?”

Possibilities blossomed in Yachie’s imagination, and she savored them. She turned slowly to look down at the goddess next to her. Yet as she mustered her thoughts, the guilt pulled stronger. She filtered it from her voice and replaced it with a cool detachment. “What would your General think about this line of questioning?”

Keiki met her gaze and tilted her head ever so slightly. “I don’t see what Mayumi has to do with this project or your body.”

Yachie merely raised her eyebrows.

The Idola Deus gave her a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She broke off her gaze, but not before Yachie read the sadness in it. “I fear you have some misconceptions as to the nature of my relationship with the Brigadier General.”

“Misconceptions?” scoffed Yachie. “She shares your bed! She  _ worships _ you.”

Keiki’s tone grew sharper than the matriarch had ever heard it. “That is precisely why my bed is  _ all _ that we share. My god, Yachie! I am her direct superior. I am her creator! I am her  _ goddess! _ How could she possibly refuse me? How could anything equitable form between us in the face of that hideous disparity?”

“Then why string her along as you do?” Yachie crossed her arms, letting her tail flick behind her.

Keiki took several breaths before she answered. She strode slowly to a potter’s wheel, away from the empty body on the slabs and the matriarch following her with her gaze. “There’s such a hunger in me. I let it take hold of me too strongly when I made Mayumi. It was not the least of the forces that shaped her.” She lifted her hands before her, still clad in the insulated, inexpressive mitts. “But I was so happy. She still delights me. If I didn’t have her—”

Keiki returned her gaze once more. Within her eyes burned such defiance, such love, such wretchedness that Yachie nearly lost her poise. The Idola Deus spoke with a terrible levelness. “If I couldn’t have the touch of another woman in this land of ghosts I would go mad.”

“You love her,” Yachie said.

“I love her,” said Keiki. “I give her the love of a goddess, the love of a friend. But I must never be her lover.”

Yachie said nothing and looked away. She picked up a scale from the tray, now cool enough to touch. The texture of unglazed pottery seemed to snag against her senses unpleasantly, yet this was Keiki’s preferred medium.

“And now,” Keiki said quietly, “Now I fear I have only spread that hunger to you.”

Yachie returned the scale to the tray with minor relief. She chuckled and crossed the workspace to the goddess’s side. “You give yourself far too much credit, my dear. You have introduced no hungers to which I was not already shackled.” Yachie slipped her claw under Keiki’s chin and tilted her head up to face her. “You have merely given me the means to eat.”

“Mmm,” Keiki hummed. Yachie could feel her breath with her every word. “Then we’d better get you fed.”

Yachie leaned in and leisurely kissed the goddess. Keiki slipped the mitts from her hands to better run her fingers through Yachie’s hair and pull her closer. Yachie thrilled at the touch and tasted her more deeply. It wasn’t merely the touch and the taste of her that thrilled her — it was finding the same hunger reflected within her adversary. There was no one to interrupt them as they sated it.

“Now, as to my previous question—” began Keiki, pulling back slightly.

Yachie licked her lips and tasted the sweetness of lychee from whatever balm the goddess wore. The matriarch grinned lasciviously. “It’s modular, isn’t it?”

Keiki grabbed the matriarch’s shoulders and nearly started vibrating with excitement. “You see! You see! This is  _ precisely _ why I wanted your input!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next two chapters contain scenes that are sexually explicit! buckle up


	4. To Each According to Her Need

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter contains explicit sexual content!

“Have you ever sculpted genitalia on a potter’s wheel, Yachie?” asked Keiki, doing precisely that.

“I can’t say that I’ve sculpted anything before, wheel or no,” said Yachie, sitting at a wheel across from the goddess and familiarizing herself with the foot pedals.

“That’s a shame. It’s almost therapeutic, I find.” Keiki’s hands moved along the clay with a deft surety, shaping curves with the subtlest movements. Yachie couldn’t help but compare it to her own crude, stumbling efforts. It was not a particularly flattering comparison.

“Shouldn’t I start with… I don’t know, making a bowl? A plate?” She lurched to catch an outgrowth of clay that unbalanced and threatened to fling itself away through centrifugal force.

“We all have to start somewhere,” said Keiki. “Why not dicks? We’re still prototyping. It’s simply a freeform exploration of form.”

“There’s no artistry in this, I’m afraid,” rumbled Yachie. She gestured to the lump spinning slowly to a halt on her wheel, unable to keep the frustration from her voice.

Keiki sat up to get a better look at Yachie’s wheel, and smiled encouragingly. “I think it has a sort of raw charm. Don’t be so hard on yourself!”

“Mm.”

Yachie consolidated the clay back into a starting base and dripped a bit more water over it. She was determined, she told herself, to enjoy this exercise. Halfway through shaping herself a crude shaft, an errant claw gouged out a structurally-critical ring of clay and the entire edifice collapsed. She was determined, she told herself, not to blame herself for this failure. A single glance at the goddess revealed her humming softly over an absolutely breathtaking specimen that only grew more shapely with her every touch. Yachie’s determination in these matters, she found, could only accomplish so much.

“Keiki,” she said.

“Yes, darling?” Keiki replied.

“I don’t enjoy this.”

“That’s a shame,” said Keiki. There was no reproach in her tone.

Yachie rose to wash the clay from her hands at a nearby basin. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be. It’s not everyone’s medium. I was hoping to be clear that I cast no judgement on your skill level.”

“It wasn’t you,” said Yachie. “I’m afraid the barrier is simply too steep.”

“I see,” said Keiki. Though there was no reproach, it was clear she had been hoping that the activity would be something mutually enjoyable. Keiki floundered for something new to do. “Would you like—”

“I would like a more hands-on approach,” said Yachie, turning from the basin and ambling closer to where Keiki remained seated. “With a nested series of temporary sensation glyphs, it should be possible for my body to form an ad hoc connection even to unfired clay.”

In a flash, Keiki’s trepidation evaporated. Her aura flared subtly as she considered the suggestion of applied thaumaturgical engineering. “Oh, absolutely. You gleaned that possibility from a glance at my code?”

“I’ve dabbled in sigilography,” said Yachie. She unbuttoned the rear over-tail buttons of her slacks.

“You continually surprise me, my dear,” said Keiki. The goddess stood to rummage around her workspace for magically conductive pigment and a brush. “I should have a compound that does just the trick.”

Yachie removed her slacks and underclothes, then spent a moment switching off the motor of Keiki’s pottery wheel and moving her sculpt carefully to the side. She settled herself gracefully on the wheel and began to unbutton her shirt. “Glad you approve of this prototyping method.”

“Of course!” said Keiki. She returned with pigment and brush. “But… you really didn’t want to design and create your own?”

“I demand the best of all things, Keiki Haniyasushin. The divide between my aesthetic needs and my capability to meet them is too harsh to bridge in the time we have.” Yachie removed her shirt and shifted more weight back to her tail as Keiki seated herself before her. “I need your talents, your sensibilities, your… artist’s touch.”

“You would rank me among the best of all things?” Keiki smiled coyly, then laid down the first stroke of a glyph.

Yachie took a breath at the contact. She looked to the vaulted ceiling above and her voice came out nearly as a growl. “Of course I would. When have I ever bested you for long? I must make for a sorry nemesis.”

Keiki linked the final glyph of the magical circle drawn over Yachie’s featureless groin. The intensity of Yachie’s senses expanded. Keiki began the next circle as she answered. “Have I not already made my feelings in this clear, Yachie? That persistence and cunning of yours, even in the face of my divinity, are precisely why I’m excited by this project. You love to defy me. You don’t  _ worship _ me. To you I’m simply ‘that bitch over in the Primate Garden.’ It’s refreshing.”

“I don’t—” laughed Yachie. Another circle complete. It was growing difficult to converse with Keiki’s brush on her. “I’ve never thought that about you. You’re the biggest shake-up the Beast Realm has ever seen. You are a—” Her voice hitched at the energy surge of Keiki beginning another glyph-ring on her. “—A worthy foe.”

“Glad to hear someone’s been noticing my efforts,” said Keiki. She linked the third nested spell of sensation and rubbed her fingers in the circle of Yachie’s flesh they enshrined. “How’s this?”

Yachie loosed a hiss of pleasure. “I could take another spell. This is  _ nice _ , though.”

“Isn’t it fun?” Keiki agreed, giving the null expanse on Yachie’s groin an affectionate pat before she started the next magic circle. “I admire its simplicity. Just ‘the spot you press to feel better.’ Utilitarian, yet decadent.”

“We can do more,” hissed Yachie. Her grip tightened upon the rim of the wheel she sat on.

“I’ve always thought so,” said Keiki with a smile. She linked the final circle, set aside the brush and pigment, wet her hands and prepared a fresh block of clay. “Are you ready?” she asked.

Yachie nodded.

Keiki slapped the clay solidly into the center of the nested spells. Strange and enticing textural senses blossomed within Yachie as her senses expanded into the raw clay. Keiki’s hands rested upon her with such a promise to seep into her, to shape her.

“It’s working  _ marvelously,” _ said Yachie, breathless in a tone halfway between rumble and purr.

“It was a splendid suggestion, darling,” said Keiki. She laughed softly, then started to knead the clay. “I’ve always maintained that just because the Beast Realm  _ began _ as a plane of karmic punishment doesn’t mean it has to  _ stay _ one.”

Yachie could barely focus. It was such an unprecedented sensation to be so painlessly pliable beneath the hands of the Idola Deus. She felt at mercy to an entirely new facet of her power. It thrilled her.

“Slimmer profile,” she hissed.

“Of course,” replied Keiki. She worked her fingers into the corners of the clay brick and peeled away tracts of material. Yachie tightened her grip on the wheel and her tail thrashed in search of something to coil around. With every plunge, the surface area of her clay bifurcated, and with each trim plucked from her, the sensory intensity condensed into her remaining material.

“Split it in two,” growled Yachie. Keiki complied with gusto, then began smoothing out the remaining segments. The pressure and touch electrified Yachie.

“This is an important part of testing too, you know.” said Keiki. “If you’d like to use a body for this, it’s vital to know where you like to be touched, and how.”

Yachie was in the hands of a goddess. With ragged breath, she released her grasp of the wheel and leaned forward to catch herself on Keiki’s shoulders. Her tail swung forward to coil around Keiki’s waist. Yachie lowered herself to the level of Keiki’s ear and hissed: “Do whatever you’d like.”

“Thank you, darling. This is precisely what I meant about your mutability. There is positively no reason to settle with such potential before you.” Her hands seemed to have minds of their own. Keiki’s fingers teased into Yachie’s raw clay and dredged up folds, tendrils, ridges, delicate patterns of grooves stippled into her with the press of Keiki’s nails. Every new accoutrement, every fleeting structure nearly pulsed with erogenous intensity. Then her divine hands would simply sweep through with a fresh wash of slip and warm water and return Yachie to unformed pliancy to build her up all over again.

Yachie had no verbal response to give. Her gasps and hisses and sensuous purrs were ample feedback. She gave herself over to the indulgence. Awash in abstract pleasure, everything Keiki had said about freeform exploration finally gained its necessary context.

“This is the freedom I preach,” said Keiki. Her hands played over Yachie, drawing out guttural cries from the matriarch as Keiki shaped her pleasure. “When you are free from needs, you are free to shape yourself as you see fit. You are free to actualize your ideal self.”

Yachie’s claws dug into the goddess’s shoulders, but Keiki only grinned all the more. The goddess’s shaping grew more forceful as she put her body weight into her movements. Yachie matched her strength with her own desperate rhythm. She edged closer to the peak.

Keiki  _ squeezed _ , and the matriarch felt herself spilling between her fingers. Yachie roared. She toppled back onto her spasming tail. Every muscle of her body locked in pleasure. Her mind practically blanked.

Keiki eased her efforts, slowing her hands and letting them linger. Every delicate touch sent another pulse through Yachie. She shivered on the wheel and caught her breath.

Keiki sighed in satisfaction and patted Yachie’s thigh as she made to stand. “I’m so happy to help you self-actualize, my dear.”

Yachie was not in a position to respond.

“Take as long as you need,” smiled Keiki, wiping the clay from her hands and forearms. “I’m going to keep working on your bigger body.”

With effort, Yachie reached out and clasped her claw around Keiki’s bicep as she passed. They locked eyes. Yachie took several heaving breaths as she mustered the composure to voice her demand.

“Keiki,” she growled. “Make me a hemipene.”

———

It was ready.

It had taken them until after dinner. At last, every scale was affixed, every joint was joined, and the final glaze had set. They had wheeled the beastly form into the center of the circle. It lay on its belly, limbs draping over the table’s confines and onto to the floor.

Yachie felt a fluttering excitement building inside her.

Keiki slapped the body’s thick, scaled thigh. “It’s good we have another one for you to test. If we’re going to install the same universal adapter this one has in your present body, you wouldn’t want to be in it. It’s thankfully a quick process, but still invasive.”

“I want it. How quick a process?” Yachie couldn’t take her eyes off of her next body. Each scale gleamed subtly with glyphlight from the circle beneath it. It was a marvel of design.

“I’d say about half an hour, barring unforeseen complications.”

“Good,” rumbled Yachie. “I’d like to test the attachment as soon as possible.”

“I’m sure there are solo tests you can run while you wait,” said Keiki, with a coy smile. She looked past Yachie at the domestic partition, then breezed past the matriarch with a pat on the shoulder. “Hold that thought, darling.”

“Miss Haniyasushin!” said Mayumi as she approached.

Keiki met her a short distance outside the circle. “Hello darling. Thank you for cleaning up from dinner. She’s just about to test the bigger one. I’m excited!”

Mayumi pitched her response slightly softer for the closer conversation, but Yachie had little trouble overhearing her. “I’d like to be here for this next test as well, to ensure your safety.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you. I anticipate it will go smoothly.”

Yachie had to strain slightly to catch Mayumi’s next question. “Is Kicchou spending the night again?”

Keiki paused briefly before answering. “That’s up to her. I’m certainly not opposed to it.”

If Mayumi responded, it was a response that finally eluded Yachie’s eavesdropping abilities. After a moment, Keiki spoke again. “If she does, Mayumi, you might wish to spend the night in the officers’ quarters.”

Now she was certain of Mayumi’s silence. After several seconds, the Brigadier General finally responded. “Understood, Lady Keiki.”

Yachie glanced over her shoulder. Keiki’s face was unreadable with her back turned. Her hand rested on Mayumi’s shoulder. Mayumi couldn’t meet the gaze of her goddess, but turned it past her to bore into Yachie. The matriarch could practically see the flames in Mayumi’s gaze licking towards her. It unsettled her.

Would Yachie be forced to defend herself? Which of her bodies were best suited to violence?

Yachie turned back to her dormant body, suppressing a shiver and projecting a lack of concern. Clearly, this was a sore spot for the Haniwa officer. It was the first thing Yachie had found that she could actually leverage, but the prospect of actively using that leverage sat poorly with her. It felt too personal a blow to willingly inflict. But at the same time, Yachie  _ was _ spending the night again. The potential within her next body was far too enticing. One look was enough to see just how much of Keiki’s hunger she had channeled into this body.

For now, Mayumi would simply have to live with the consequences of her goddess’s hunger.

The two joined Yachie at the circle’s edge. Mayumi stepped forward to interpose herself between the matriarch and Keiki. Yachie looked over her.

“Will I have to leave this body first?” asked Yachie. She hadn’t even thought to test if she  _ could _ , she had been enjoying it so much. It was a credit to Keiki’s hospitality that she hadn’t had cause to confirm it.

Keiki met her gaze. “No, thankfully, both of these support body-to-body transfer. Same process as last time.”

Yachie nodded, then set one foot into the circle. She looked again to Keiki. “That begs the question, of course —  _ can _ I leave this body?”

“You should be able to, darling. It’s, er, how should I explain—”

“Focus your will upon it,” said Mayumi. Her gaze was lowered but her voice was clear. “You have to hone it to a white-hot intention. Once you have, the target becomes clear, and so does the way. You punch it through and it ejects you.”

When Mayumi looked up, the flames within her had cooled. “It’s not something I’ve ever had to use, and I’m glad.”

“Not the sort of function you want to trip accidentally!” said Keiki.

Yachie smiled. “I’ll take your word for it.” She turned and strode to the table. As she approached her dormant body, she felt a similar sort of spiritual gravity to when she had entered her current form. At the same time, it was tempered in its pull by the comfort and stability of her own body. She had the idle thought that her unoccupied bodies might make for excellent cushions. She stretched out her hand.

On the body’s broad back, within an expanse of sleek scale-clad musculature and sheltered under a canopy of glazed ceramic shell, the entry glyph flared to life.

Yachie placed her claw home.

She felt herself draining from her body for a nerve-wracking moment that felt outside of time. Yet the next moment, she felt herself pouring through the massive form. It felt that for every fluid mouthful of her spirit that passed through the threshold between her bodies, double its volume gushed into her body on the slab. As senses withdrew from her smaller form, just as many awoke within her larger form in asynchronous expansion. Her spiritual self was rearranging itself to take up the task of inhabiting a behemoth.

Enough of her cognition remained within her first body to realize she couldn’t maintain her balance within it. Falling could have material consequences now. She guided her intention across the threshold and it poured itself into her massive arm. Synapses firing. The silent determination of musculature. She caught, and was caught. She lifted, and was lifted. The connection, the touch, maintained. She felt it from two bodies at once.

Then she was through. She was through, and testing muscles, tasting the air, blinking and breathing and  _ feeling. _ The effortless strength to carry a whole body in a single massive claw. The majestic length of her tail to balance her. The silky touch of scale upon scale where her body brushed itself.

She pressed her lower claws to the floor and sensed her own mass when she transferred it from the table to her own power. While her shell and tail balanced her body backwards, she had a bit of counterbalance. She lifted herself from her ventral-clad chest and felt her breasts decompress. They were a novelty she had rather enjoyed from her previous, more human-like body. After brief debate, they had carried them forward to the final design. Yachie liked the bit of mammalian incongruency. It was another feature to mark her as well and truly monstrous.

Before, she was a presence. Now, she was a  _ manifestation. _

“Remarkable!” said Keiki, as she stepped into the circle. “You — you controlled both of them for a moment there, did you not?”

“Yess,” she rumbled. Her voice in this body was like an avalanche. Her palate was more serpentine and still unfamiliar to speak in. Yachie stood to a formidable new height. She ferried her old body to the table her new body had just risen from. “There’s an asynchronousss buffer of ssome sort during transfer. I was able to make use of it.”

Keiki took a quick note in her notebook. “Goodness. I could possibly look into that for next time—”

“Next time I will use a chair. It was not wholly unpleasant.”

Keiki smiled and stowed her notebook. “Delightful to hear, but it still may be a safety issue. But it’ll wait. In the meantime, I’ve work to do on that other body of yours!”

“Take all the time you need,” said Yachie. She strode from the circle to a nearby counter, but stopped. She turned to meet Mayumi’s hollow gaze. The Brigadier General looked up at her with trepidation and curiosity swirling around a core of determination.

“General,” said Yachie. “I am enjoying Keiki’s hospitality. I will not harm her under her roof.”

Mayumi’s eyes narrowed. “What do you think your word means to me, Kicchou?”

“Mayumi, darling,” said Keiki, turning from the table and crossing the circle. She took Mayumi’s hands in her own. “I can look after myself tonight. Don’t worry.”

Mayumi tore her gaze from Yachie to look at her goddess’s gesture. After a moment, she looked up to meet Keiki’s gaze. “Have a good night, Miss Haniyasushin.”

“You too, Mayumi.”

Mayumi stepped backwards, saluted, then left. Yachie turned back to the countertop and gently picked up the completed hemipene attachment from its stand. Beneath its base was the counterpart mechanism to the adaptor nestled between her scaled thighs. Blossoming up from it were a pair of sleek and almost tapering phalii. They would be large on her old body. Her present body could nestle each shaft comfortably between the digits of her claw, but that was perhaps more testament to the size of Yachie’s claw. It was not a proportional mismatch she was particularly concerned about — any larger and it might pose a danger to her testing partner.

To Keiki.

Yachie socketed the hemipene between her legs and locked it into place. Sensations flared within her as the attachment — her attachment — seemed to come alive in her grasp. It was sensitive, sensuous, responsive. As her vitality and bodily awareness flooded into her hemipene, the base sealed itself seamlessly to her body. The shape of it, the twin sensations, the heft and weight, all of them cohered into a tremendously fulfilling gestalt. This was an  _ exceptional _ first pick. She’d have to get another just to have a spare.

Before she grew too absorbed in her new genital, Yachie tested another bit of self-exploration. She focused her intention on decoupling it from her body. As she concentrated, the seam around the base reappeared, and she felt deep mechanical movement as the attachment decoupled. She grasped it, unlocked it and pulled it from her body. The sensations seemed to linger briefly before they faded. She locked it into place again, and felt sense blossom within her once more. She tried the motion while locked, winced from the slight pain, and found the fit unyielding.

Yachie tested the decoupling and recoupling process again. It was simple enough to signal the intention and to follow through, and smooth enough mechanically. Yet at the same time, it was impossible to trip accidentally. Keiki’s design philosophy suffused this body at every level of scope, and her design philosophy was simply the extension of her material philosophy. It was a challenging philosophy.

“Enjoying yourself?” asked the Idola Deus. She had set up a surgery curtain over her old body and lifted herself over it to speak.

“Testing is important,” purred Yachie.

“Agreed. If it would be more comfortable for you, you’re welcome to use my bedroom.”

Yachie laughed, a noise that rattled through her massive frame. “Afraid you might find it too distracting?”

Keiki scoffed, but her eyes twinkled. “It’s a big bed. I’ll join you soon enough.”


	5. From Each According to Her Ability

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the first scene of this chapter contains explicit sexual content! past the scene break (———) it is smooth sailing but i'm afraid i put character development in the sex scene

It  _ was _ a big bed. Yachie lay back on her shell, sweaty haunches splayed before her. Between her legs, her tail snaked idly across the ripped sheets just to feel the texture of the weave against her scales. She found herself catching her breath in an idle valley of convalescence past a range of mountainous climaxes. This was her state when Keiki Haniyasushin joined her.

“Come and see the ruin I have made of your sheets,” rumbled Yachie, her tone low and hazy. Between the points of her shell and the thrashing of her claws, the sheets had never stood a chance.

Keiki raised her eyebrows. “You certainly have.” She circled past her wardrobe on the way to the bed, untying her apron as she walked.

“It’s the first thing of yours I’ve managed to destroy in weeks,” said Yachie. “Let me have this.”

“It’s quite alright, darling,” said Keiki. She dropped the stained apron in a sturdier laundry basket, then began unlacing the cord wraps over her forearms. “Saves me the worry of ruining a fresh sheet.”

Yachie shifted slightly to keep face with Keiki’s approach. She laughed between breaths. “Of course you don’t care about it. You don’t know what I mean by ‘let me have this.’”

Keiki reached behind her to unbutton the back of her dress. “Oh, fine, I’m distraught. Do you know how much of a pain it is to get that kind of threadcount down here? I only have so many sets.”

“How many?”

Keiki sighed dramatically. “Fourteen, now.”

Yachie grinned. “You can spare one or two.”

Kieki stepped out of her dress, then shook her hair free of her headwrap. Yachie leaned forward to take in the sight of her body. The goddess was soft and plentiful. Her every movement flowed from a core of strength and certainty. Her aura shimmered in the air about her, undimmed by intervening fabric. A pair of nubby horns poked through the hair atop her head.

“Surprised?” asked Keiki, following her gaze up.

“I should have known from how you sculpted my antlers,” Yachie said.

“Personal experience is a deep well to draw from. This is why I don’t think you should give up on creative pursuits — I want to know what kind of art you can make in a body like that.” Keiki hopped up onto the bed. With Yachie propped back on her shell, the goddess barely stood level with her head. Yachie sprawled out before her.

“I’m afraid my opinion of ceramics hasn’t changed,” said Yachie. She felt her hemipenes pulse against themselves in anticipation as the goddess walked across the bed.

“I want you to find your medium! I’m interested in what you do and I’m especially interested in what you can do with the bodies I’ve made you.” She now stood at Yachie’s side and reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder.

“Experience comes before art,” purred Yachie. “We’ve got a body to test.”

“I’ll need to warm up a bit. You’re welcome to help.”

Yachie patted her body invitingly. There was ample space along her ventral-clad front between her breasts and the curve of her belly for a human-sized partner to recline. Keiki stepped over her and settled herself back onto Yachie, nestling her head between Yachie’s breasts. The goddess sighed in contentment.

“Aren’t you glad I opted to keep them?” asked Yachie. She lifted her claws to brace Keiki’s legs and keep her steady.

“Consider my doubts silenced,” said Keiki, scooting slightly to find the best position within Yachie’s grasp. She started to touch herself with a silent confidence.

“I didn’t intend to tear up the sheets,” said Yachie. “But in the throes of climax, it was impossible to avoid. They’re absolutely exquisite. Someday you must tell me your supplier.”

“What, and spoil the investigation for you? I told you it’s quite alright,” laughed Keiki. She held up a free hand expectantly and a bottle of lubricant sailed from her boudoir and into her waiting grasp. Her other hand deftly explored her folds. “Here. For later.”

Yachie purred, a deep rumbling that played through her body and vibrated into Keiki. “Planned like a true Kiketsu.”

“I don’t follow,” said Keiki. Her voice hitched slightly as she found a potent rhythm of self-exploration.

“Only because no one ever taught you the iron-clad law of the Kiketsu family,” Yachie hissed. She snaked her head down closer to the goddess’s ear. “The back door is the swiftest and best route.”

“Fuck off, darling,” laughed Keiki. “You venture into a god’s precinct with this level of pillow talk? Perhaps I’ve overestimated you.”

“If only there were some way to occupy my tongue,” said Yachie.

“Well, perhaps my estimation of you will recover after all.” Keiki shifted against her, making to rise. Yachie lifted her effortlessly by the thighs and spun her in midair until they faced one another. Keiki’s face, already flushed from her efforts, flushed deeper. Yachie lifted her further, flicking out her tongue and savoring the scent of their bodies working together. Keiki reached out to brace herself on one of Yachie’s antlers and used it to pull herself closer.

Yachie teased Keiki’s folds with deft flicks of her forked tongue, tasting her sweat and arousal. She wanted more. Her tongue plunged into Keiki’s pussy. She parted her maw slightly to grant herself a better angle for her tongue’s considerable length. To drink in more of the goddess’s taste through an ardent kiss.

“Oh, yes,” breathed Keiki, working herself subtly against the tongue filling her. “That’s good.”

Yachie’s purring rumble climbed in intensity. She lifted her tail and brushed its tip along Keiki’s spine, eliciting a shivering sigh from her. While a tuft of dragon fur adorned her smaller body’s tail, this body’s more serpentine tail simply tapered to a scaly tip roughly the width of a finger. Keiki reached back and pulled Yachie’s tail in front of her, cupping it steady under an elbow as she opened the bottle of lube. It was cold on her scales when Keiki poured it over her tail, but it would warm soon with body contact.

“What a versatile body we’ve made you,” hummed Keiki. “Please, keep warming me up.”

Yachie huffed at her tone — the request bordered on an order — but readily obliged. It simply proved the same thought had occurred to Keiki about her body’s potential. Yachie reclaimed her tailtip and teased it slowly into Keiki’s asshole. Keiki gasped. She steadied herself with her grasp on Yachie’s antler. It was such an intimacy, to be inside her.

“Good, good,” said Keiki. She poured more lube behind her. Yachie could feel the tremble of her thighs in her grasp. She pushed her tail deeper.

“Do you know what I really want, Yachie?” Keiki asked warmly. Her voice reflected only a hint of the pleasure reflected in the movements of her body.

Yachie glanced up at her and made an inquisitive “Mmn?” Keiki’s taste only heightened her arousal. Every drip rolling down her shafts sent a thrill of anticipation through her.

“I want to end suffering.”

Yachie withdrew her tongue with a parting flick and lowered Keiki slightly. “How warmed up are you?”

“Just a touch longer, darling.” Keiki shifted her grasp from Yachie’s antler to her crest of scales. Thus steadied, she poured another generous helping of lube onto Yachie’s tail.

“You’re more ambitious than I gave you credit for,” rumbled Yachie.

“You have to be, if you want to last long as a god,” said Keiki. She made a satisfied noise as Yachie slid her tail deeper.

“Perhaps the Beast Realm has shaped you more than you’d like to think,” Yachie smirked.

“I liked it better when you were eating me out,” said Keiki.

“You’re warmer there anyway,” said Yachie. “You were the one who started a philosophical debate.”

“It’s less a matter of philosophy and more a matter of praxis.” As Keiki replied, Yachie lifted her and teased her tongue back inside her. “Oh! I certainly am warmer there.”

“Mmn?” Yachie hummed encouragingly. Loathe as she was to give up this taste, her tongue was only one part of her to test.

“Yes, I’m ready. You’ve been most helpful, darling.”

Yachie slipped her tongue free of Keiki’s pussy. She let her tailtip ride Keiki nearly the whole distance from her maw to her underbelly as she lowered Keiki. This frame had such an effortless strength and boundless stamina. Now it was the goddess in Yachie’s claws.

“Goodness, look at you,” tittered Keiki. “You almost don’t need the lubricant! You’re  _ excited.” _

Yachie was drenched in her anticipation. It was heartening to know just how  _ productive _ this attachment could be. “There’s always cause for more lubrication,” she rumbled.

“Naturally.” Keiki nearly upended the bottle as she poured lubricant over Yachie’s serpentine shafts. She set the bottle aside, then worked the lube evenly over the hemipene. Yachie hissed out a gasp. These were the hands that sculpted her. But she had already felt the power within them. Tonight was for Yachie to show Keiki her own power.

Yachie lifted and turned the goddess over her waiting shafts. Keiki shifted her grasp to guide them home as she lowered herself.

“Oh!” said Keiki, her voice percussive with satisfaction. Yachie gave a low cry as she slipped doubly inside Keiki. Keiki’s pussy took her readily. Her asshole was nearly as receptive, owing to the sleek profile of Yachie’s shafts. Keiki started to work herself slowly against Yachie.

“Most suffering is simply a consequence of the distribution of resources,” said Keiki. Yachie slid a claw up her back to brace her. With every bit of her length that slipped deeper inside the goddess it grew harder to focus on anything but the sensation. How could Keiki possibly continue a conversation now?

“You have some idea for how to distribute my resources, then?” managed Yachie. Her every breath came as a rumbling purr.

“Depends on what you have to give,” Keiki replied sultrily. She steadily increased the speed of her rhythm. Yachie matched it in pleasure-hazed confidence.

“Sounds to me like just another form of rule,” said Yachie. In this moment, filling Keiki, pleasure was what ruled her.

Keiki laughed even as her body trembled and tensed. “Sometimes it’s good to do what you’re told.”

“You admit your ambitions, then?” Yachie hissed, clutching her tighter and bowing her viper’s head closer. “Rule through policy and let compliance determine worthiness for who gets what.”

“Yachie, shut up for a second,” grunted Keiki, shifting her arm from where it was pinned against Yachie’s front. “You slipped out of me.”

“Fuck,” said Yachie. She supported Keiki’s efforts to reposition. Keiki guided the errant shaft back to her asshole and took a breath. She released her breath as a long moan; she slid Yachie inside her all the way to the hilt. Yachie cried out gutturally.

“Everyone’s worthy, Yachie. It’s simply a matter of meeting their needs.” Keiki’s control was unreal. This deep within her, their connection was solid and tight. She turned a heavy-lidded, self-satisfied gaze up to Yachie. “You can go harder. I’m a goddess.”

Yachie growled in response. She weighed her claws down on Keiki’s shoulders, tightening her grasp around the goddess’s body. Yachie rocked from her hips to her shell as she rutted Keiki with a fevered momentum. Lusty purrs hitched and resonated inside her, climbing in strength and intensity.

“Yachie,” moaned Keiki. Yachie met her gaze as her senses tunneled around her inevitable climax. The goddess’s eyes glowed.

“Yachie, let’s build a  _ paradise _ together.”

Yachie roared. Her body spasmed as she clutched Keiki to herself. Her furcate shafts flooded into Keiki. All she knew were the heat, the flow, the riotous pleasure.

“Oh!” Keiki’s voice shook with joyous laughter. “Oh, how lovely! Oh,  _ thank _ you.”

Even as she laughed, Keiki’s aura flared. She clenched herself hungrily over Yachie and shuddered in pleasure against her. It was proof she had shared in a tremendous climax.

Yachie slowed her rutting. Her flood subsided to a steady gushing, then fitful pumps that teased her spine from head to tail with every aftershock. She purred languidly with every heavy breath.

“Mmm,” hummed Keiki. She slipped her head between Yachie’s breasts again and cozied her body closer, nearly burrowed into her ventrals. “Mmmm, what  _ is _ this? Does it usually feel  _ this _ good?”

Yachie croaked out a rumbling laugh and squeezed her. “You haven’t heard? The cum of a dragon turtle is medicinal.”

“Did I put that in you?” laughed Keiki in a hazy incredulity.

Yachie flicked her tongue out idly, tasting the scent of their bodies entangled. Her thoughts were placid and her body was sated. “Seems to be emergent behavior.”

“Fascinating,” Keiki mumbled into her breast.

They basked together, silent save for Yachie’s purrs. Yachie felt Keiki breathing slowly even as her body’s breaths effortlessly lifted the goddess in turn. After a time, the monoliths idled down and dimmed their glow. In the gentle gloom, Keiki’s divinity shimmered like an aurora around them, and Yachie’s iridescent scales were as the star-strewn sky it shone in.

Keiki Haniyasushin, pressed against her, wrapped in her claws, wrapped in her strength, filled with her. What a strange turn her life had taken since gaining form. There was a wholeness radiating within Yachie that felt too big for her body to contain. She grasped all of the wholeness she could and held it within herself.

Keiki shifted softly against her, and the movement opened up a channel for a rivulet of cum to flow down Yachie’s thigh. “Mmm,” said Keiki. She braced herself up on an unsteady elbow and looked up at Yachie with a heavy-lidded smile. “I nearly fell asleep.” After a breath, she seemed to recall how far a distance it was to Yachie’s face and kissed her breast instead. She flopped back against her belly.

Yachie purred. After a moment, Keiki lifted herself again. “I’m not sleeping in this,” she grunted. “I have lube hands.”

“Dreadful,” rumbled Yachie. She slid a claw up Keiki’s chest, digits splayed between the goddess’s breasts, and helped push her up.

As Keiki lifted herself from Yachie’s hemipene, her legs wavered like jelly where she braced against Yachie’s thighs. Yachie’s breath hitched as she slipped free from Keiki. Keiki loosed a brief but profound moan. There came the sound of wet suction and a seismic gurgling almost more akin to plumbing than biology.

“I am absolutely not sleeping in this,” groaned Keiki. “Thank god the sheets were already ruined.”

“Yet again you twist my destruction to your advantage,” rumbled Yachie. She lifted Keiki to her feet. Keiki wobbled back and forth, still dripping steadily over Yachie’s scales. She knit her brows in brief concentration and her weight slowly lifted off of Yachie’s body. The goddess leaned back into the bedroom air and drifted upwards in slow flight. Her aura glimmered softly beneath her.

Yachie smiled up at her. Keiki spun softly in midair until she smiled back down at Yachie. The goddess made a lazy shooing gesture to the side. “Off the bed, darling.”

Yachie rumbled indignantly as she rolled herself heavily onto the floor. Keiki gestured breezily over her bed. The ravaged sheets slipped themselves from the mattress and suspended themselves in midair at the foot of the bed like the tattered sails of a storm-tossed galleon. Keiki rested her chin on her hand in fond contemplation.

“And you say you’re not an artist, Yachie,” she said. “I’d say you found your medium.”

Yachie laughed. With another gesture, Keiki sent the ruined sheets sailing into a laundry basket as a fresh set billowed from an armoire and affixed themselves to the bed.

Yachie nodded appreciatively “Convenient.”

Keiki turned her beatific smile back to Yachie and drifted down to her. She planted a kiss on the crest of scales atop Yachie’s head. “I’m a goddess, darling. Let’s clean up.”

———

Keiki Haniyasushin’s couch was not a bad place to sleep, but her bed — her  _ bed. _ A grand expanse of silk and softness stretched around the two of them. For Keiki, it was truly excessive, yet for the body she had made Yachie, it was perfect. The heavy scent of sex had diffused to the edges of the bedroom, leaving the clean scent of fresh sheets. Yachie lay on her side, wrapping her massive arms around Keiki. Keiki lay with her back nestled against Yachie’s chest. Her earthy scent, tempered by the bath they had shared, drifted up pleasantly to Yachie. It was an ideal setup for sleep, but neither slept just yet.

Together their bodies explored a different rhythm — the gentle tides of breath, the cycles of heartbeats orbiting synchronicity.

“Do you like it?” asked Keiki. She spoke softly in the dark, nearly a murmur.

“Mm?” Yachie quietly rumbled. She held Keiki so close that she felt every vibration of the goddess’s sleepy voice. Certainly Keiki felt it too.

“Your body. This body.”

“It’s magnificent,” said Yachie. “My power, my shape, it’s a joy to express, to inhabit.”

“Better than your first one?”

Yachie purred faintly as she weighed the question. “I’ve been in this one less than a day. Only two days for the original. I can’t judge so quickly. I cherish them both.”

“I’m glad,” hummed Keiki. She burrowed back against Yachie to shift into a better position. After a quiet moment, Keiki voiced a request.

“Squeeze me as hard as you can.”

“What?” said Yachie, her reply tinged with concern.

The goddess giggled. “You heard me. Show me your strength, Yachie.”

Yachie grunted and wrapped her massive arms firmly around Keiki’s chest. Keiki took a deep breath. As Yachie slowly increased the pressure of her embrace, Keiki released her breath in a drawn-out, satisfied groan. Spurred on by her apparent enjoyment, Yachie squeezed harder. It was still a fraction of her true strength.

Several of Keiki’s vertebrae audibly popped and her groan hitched into a timbre of deeper satisfaction. Worry filtered through Yachie’s thoughts, but she amplified her pressure all the same. Just when she feared she would start crushing Keiki, the goddess tapped her arm, signalling her to relent. Yachie did so, equally relieved that she hadn’t hurt Keiki and satisfied at the strength of her embrace.

“Ahhhhh,” Kieki sighed, nestling back against Yachie’s wide scales. “I’ve been trying to work that out of my back all day. Thank you, darling.”

“Thank  _ you,” _ countered Yachie. “You’ve perfected my ventral squish.”

Keiki laughed softly. She ran her hand idly over Yachie’s forearm. “You could have squeezed me harder, though.”

“I would have broken your ribs,” rumbled Yachie.

“You still could have squeezed me  _ harder.” _

Yachie chuckled. “I promised your General I wouldn’t harm you under your roof.”

“Making good on your word?” Keiki said with a hint of impertinence. “Truly a new era for the Kiketsu.”

Yachie retorted by squeezing her again like a vice. “Don’t give me cause to regret my promise, you wicked god.”

Keiki giggled and tapped out quickly. Yachie relented. They lay for a time in each other’s warmth.

“I should make you an outfit tomorrow,” said Keiki. Yachie nearly missed it. She was drifting.

“Mm?” Yachie rumbled in sleepy inquiry.

“It would take a lot of fabric, though,” muttered Keiki. “Maybe the sheets?”

Yachie stirred against her in subdued indignity.  _ “Those _ sheets?”

“I’d wash them first!” Keiki laughed and gave her claw a squeeze. “Only joking, darling. But it would be a  _ statement, _ wouldn’t it?”

“Not one I care to make,” said Yachie. She rested her viper’s snout against the back of Keiki’s head and breathed in her scent. Keiki leaned back into the embrace and sighed in satisfaction. Sleep snagged insistently at Yachie’s faculties with every lull in the conversation, but even then Yachie could sense a question brewing within the goddess.

“Why the bigness, Yachie?” Keiki’s voice was open and soft, and no judgement colored her curiosity.

“Big question,” rumbled Yachie.

“Doesn’t have to be a big answer,” said Keiki.

“Why the bigness?” Yachie echoed. Even hushed in the bedroom’s gloom, she let the statement resonate through her massive frame. “No one should be taller than me.”

Keiki giggled. “Shouldn’t be a problem anymore, then.”

“Yes,” said Yachie. She mulled further. Sleep’s proximity let candor slip through. “Part of me feels as though… As though if I’m big enough, then no one can take anything from me again.”

Keiki made a soft affirming noise and squeezed her claw. Yachie breathed deeply. She had already closed her eyes.

“I know it’s naive,” said Yachie.

“Not wholly unfounded,” said Keiki. She brought her other hand to rest over Yachie’s claw.

Yachie said nothing. Perhaps she had already said too much. The warmth and presence of Keiki in her arms called her to sleep.

“Yachie,” Keiki spoke softly. “If you need help with your bodies — if you need help with anything — I’m here. If you have a problem, you can come to me. I want us to be friends like that.”

Friends?

After all that Yachie had done? After her every struggle, her every defiance, her every dire scheme to target the Idola Deus of the Primate Garden? Friends? After everything she had taken from Keiki — and for what in return? Who could afford friends in the Beast Realm? Who would want a friend who was sworn to destroy them?  _ Friends? _

What did Keiki think a friend was?

Nestling her adversary in her implacable grasp, sleep claimed Yachie at last.


	6. Fortune and Misfortune

“Helloooo? Anyone in?”

The call from the sanctum’s entrance accompanied a wooden knocking, as of someone rapping a broomstick against resonant ceramic. It was enough to wake Keiki and start Yachie surfacing from sleep. Her massive body seemed to sleep more soundly, but feeling Keiki extricate herself from under her arm and tail was enough to wake her the rest of the way.

“What is it?” Yachie rumbled blearily.

“Miss Kirisame is here,” said Keiki, her voice soft and unconcerned. “What a pleasant surprise.”

Yachie watched from the bed as Keiki prepared herself for a new day and visitors. As the goddess picked out an ensemble from her wardrobe, a brush floated behind her, combing the sleep and mess from her hair, working gently around the nubs of her horns. Once some semblance of order had been restored, she waved the brush away with a fond smile and gathered her hair together under a clean wrap.

“I’ve heard that witch has some sticky fingers, you know,” said Yachie. “Aren’t you concerned?”

Keiki turned back to her as she applied balm to her lips, then smiled brightly. “What, and deprive my creations of a chance to see the world?”

Yachie hissed out a laugh. She rose from the bed at last, careful not to puncture the bedding on the points of her shell. After brief consideration, she rejected the indignity of using a blanket to preserve her modesty. Modesty was a human contrivance. Clothes were a lesser concern with a body this magnificent. She followed Keiki out of her sanctum’s bedroom.

Marisa Kirisame seemed to be muttering to herself as she poked around the workshops, apparently unaware that her host was now awake and about. Marisa’s posture stiffened when she saw Yachie’s dormant body resting in the circle-bound massage chair. She prodded it a few times with her broomstick in morbid trepidation before Keiki called out to her.

“Marisa! Welcome! So good to see you again.”

Marisa started, but segued it fluidly into an innocuous about-face. “Heya, Keiki. Great to be back. Woah!” Her gaze traveled up Yachie’s newest form looming behind the goddess. Color rushed to her cheeks. “You got huge! And nude! That’s — uh — that’s a  _ look.” _

Yachie bared her massive fangs in a self-satisfied grin. There were two possibilities to account for Marisa’s impromptu visit, both equally probable. The simplest possibility was merely that the witch had dropped in by happenstance, which Yachie had gathered was her wont. The other possibility was that after two nights of silence from the sanctum of the Idola Deus, Yachie’s lieutenants jumped to the worst possible conclusion.

Keiki bridged the distance between herself and Marisa and took her gently by the arm. “What brings you down here today?” she asked.

The friendly contact jolted Marisa out of her undisguised gawking. “Uh! Just drummin’ up business, y’know? We’re an anything-goes kinda shop — extermination requests, item acquisition, freelance magical research and development, danmaku tips—” She coughed and muttered out “— _ hostage rescues _ — _ ” _

“If you want to see me, you can just say you want to see me, darling,” laughed Keiki. “Unless — what do you think, Yachie? Would you like Miss Kirisame’s help with building your  _ next _ body?”

“Pass,” said Yachie. The possibility space collapsed. Subtlety was clearly not the witch’s strong suite. Marisa’s intention — or rather the amenable intention of whichever lieutenant now rode her — was excruciatingly obvious to the matriarch. Still, she found that though rescue was unnecessary, the effort warmed her. She couldn’t blame her lieutenants for panicking. To the best of their knowledge, they were still locked in cold war with the Primate Garden. They couldn’t have known.

Marisa whistled as Keiki led their gathering back towards the domestic partition. “Wow, you built that? Looks good! You look great, Miss Kicchou!” Her last sentence emerged with a slightly different tone. The telltale gleam of possession flickered in her gaze and left a look of irritation as it passed.

“Thank you,  _ Miss Kirisame,” _ said Yachie. She didn’t bother to filter the pointedness from her reply. She had hoped Iwashi — it was undoubtedly Iwashi — could compensate for Marisa’s deficiencies in the art of subterfuge. Though Keiki seemed to have missed the gleam, it was farcical to believe she remained ignorant of the Kiketsu lieutenant’s presence. She had certainly sniffed out the spirits quickly enough in their climactic confrontation several weeks ago. In spite of this, Keiki seemed to be humoring the proceedings.

“I couldn’t take all the credit,” said Keiki, patting Marisa’s arm with her free hand. “It was a joint venture. I was about to fix breakfast, would you care to join us?”

“I ain’t one to pass up free grub,” said Marisa. She nudged Yachie with an elbow. Thanks to the pronounced difference in their statures, the nudge landed mid-thigh. “Guess that means she’s been keepin’ ya fed, huh?”

“She is an agreeable host,” admitted Yachie, settling onto the couch as Keiki began her meal preparations. Keiki’s cooking was sublime. Yachie felt a vague trepidation towards the fact that once she returned to her penthouse and headquarters she’d have to feed herself  _ every day.  _ She hadn’t the faintest idea how to cook.

“Ooh, lemme help,” said Marisa. She joined Keiki in the kitchen and rummaged around for a knife and chopping block.

Yachie felt strange to be the only one remaining seated. The prospect of simply waiting for breakfast sent a pang of guilt through her. After all the work Keiki had put into these bodies, the goddess still wouldn’t rest.

“Wolfsbane, Marisa?” asked Keiki. “Not a traditional breakfast sort of food, don’t you think?”

“Hey, it’ll keep the Keiga away, right?”

“It would keep anyone away. Isn’t that poisonous?” asked Yachie from the couch. It occurred to her that her new body was entirely the wrong size to be of any use in Keiki’s kitchen. The realization did little to assuage her guilt and only deepened the strange sentiment brooding within her.

“It cooks out!” said Marisa.

Yachie tried to simply observe the proceedings as best she could from the couch. There wasn’t anywhere particularly closer she could comfortably sit, let alone work or help. She considered herself lucky that both the Primate Garden and her penthouse at headquarters had high ceilings. Was this dysmorphia finally making itself felt? But no, she was still proud of this body. It remained affirming and powerful. But so too remained the fact that most spaces she was aware of could not accommodate her as she was.

“Marisa,” said Keiki, “I’d really rather you not put any more poisonous ingredients into this meal.”

Marisa stopped with her knife poised over a sprig of hemlock. “C’mon, a little bit of poison never hurt anybody.”

“Anything else in your larder I should know about, or would that spoil the surprise?” asked Yachie.

Keiki raised her hands defensively and laughed. “Those aren’t my ingredients, darling.”

“Brought ‘em myself!” Marisa grinned. “Y’never know when a meal needs a little kick.”

“Kick elsewhere, please,” Keiki said. “There’s more than enough for all of us without hazardous improvisations.”

“Fine,” Marisa sighed. She scooped the hemlock back into her satchel and started to work on an onion. Just before she began to peel it, she gestured at Yachie with her knife. “I’m just sayin’, she’s huge. She could probably take a lot of poison.”

There were two possibilities to account for this inept attempted poisoning. The first was that the Kiketsu lieutenants had, knowingly or unknowingly, pinned their rescue hopes on the least competent assassin of the living world. There was some merit to this possibility despite its absurd complexity — Marisa had certainly failed to kill Keiki when they fought weeks ago. The other possibility, perhaps even more concerning, was that the witch was some sort of recreational poison eater. Yachie stood and rolled her neck languidly, eliciting a series of hollow pops and faint hisses from her internal workings, before turning an eye down to Marisa. “Are you certain you wish to test my poison tolerance, Miss Kirisame?”

“For god’s sakes, I already said it cooks out! Like what, you gonna die  _ again? _ Buncha wimps down here.” Marisa busied herself with chopping, but after a moment glanced back up. Her eyes gleamed with spectral presence and concern. She mouthed  _ Sorry, Miss Kicchou! _ Yachie smirked.

“Yachie, darling, go clear off some tables so we have a place to eat, will you?” said Keiki.

Yachie said nothing, but moved to action. She was silently relieved to have a reasonable task that could keep her mind from mulling on ergonomics and assassinations. After a moment, she overheard Marisa chuckle at a volume she must have thought inaudible to the matriarch. “Gotta say though, seein’ y’all gettin’ along like this is real cute!” Keiki laughed quietly in response.

Yachie set a table down slightly too heavily.  _ Cute? That impudent witch had the entirely wrong idea. _

“You sound surprised, darling,” said Keiki.

“I guess I wasn’t exactly expecting it after she, y’know, manipulated me n’ Reimu n’ Youmu into smashing up your shit.”

“Oh, but it was so thrilling to test myself against the three of you! I should be thanking her for the opportunity.”

_ Thank her? _ In the end, Keiki had  _ enjoyed _ Yachie’s efforts to destroy her. Not only had all of Yachie’s best efforts never materially advanced the Kiketsu family against Keiki, but the goddess had simply  _ had fun.  _ Just how did Keiki see her? What was that she had said just before they had both drifted off last night?  _ I want us to be friends like that. _

Was it so wrong she felt proud for showing Keiki a good time?

“You went hard as hell!” said Marisa. “Didn’t you tell me that was your first duel with spellcards?”

“Yes, most of the conflicts down here are rather nastier affairs. It was nice to have structure to it for a change.”

Yachie returned to the living room to move stools out for Keiki and Marisa. As she entered, Keiki turned from a large saucepan on the stovetop to hold up her hands in a framing position over Yachie’s body. “Marisa, what do you think for her? Pastels? Something breezy, maybe?”

Marisa imitated the gesture and squinted through the window her fingers made at Yachie. “Call me biased, but you can’t go wrong with black.” For a moment, her eyes gleamed again. “She’d look great in a suit!”

Perhaps when they were both out of this, Yachie would need to have a few words with Iwashi.

“True,” admitted Keiki. “But my god, that’s so much fabric and so much effort to wear. I just want to put something open on her. A cocktail dress, maybe.”

“Something... revealing?” rumbled Yachie. She lifted the stools effortlessly and made to carry them back out to the workshop floor.

“Can’t get any  _ more _ revealing,” muttered Marisa.

Yachie gave a parting glance over her shoulder and grinned. “I do love showing off. Make something in purple.”

Now it was Keiki she eavesdropped upon as the goddess spoke to Marisa. “You know, I think she may actually be having  _ fun _ down here.”

She  _ was. _ That was the damnable thing. She wanted to spend more mornings flush with this sense of satisfaction, enjoying fine food and finer company. But Yachie had an empire to run. Already it came calling. How many more such mornings could she find the time and opportunity to enjoy?

In the meantime, at least, there was breakfast to enjoy. After the meal, there would be an outfit to model. Even if it was her last day under the goddess’s hospitality, Yachie would enjoy the morning.

———

Yachie, Keiki, and Marisa approached the cavernous entrance to the Primate Garden. The half-light of glowing monoliths gradually transitioned to the half-light of purgatory’s late afternoon. Over one shoulder, Yachie had rather unceremoniously slung her smaller body, and her other arm held a basket of food Keiki had insisted on sending with her. Cascading from her serpentine neck down her body in airy folds was an elegant, open dress in rich purple silk. Yachie paused at the threshold to the surface, gazed at the skyline through the trees, took a deep breath, and nearly gagged.

“Has the air always smelled like that down here?” asked Yachie.

“I’m afraid so, darling,” said Keiki ruefully. “You get used to it.”

“I  _ had _ gotten used to it,” Yachie rumbled. “Then you put me in a body with a better sense of smell.”

“I maintain that with a dedicated urban reforestation campaign we could improve the Beast Realm’s air quality considerably, but—” Keiki raised her hands and eyebrows in an airy shrug, “—it’s out of my hands for the moment.”

Yachie’s gaze traveled from the skyline to the lake that surrounded the Primate Garden’s forested island. Flying was second nature to her as a spirit, as effortless as anything was when existence was a constant battle against metaphysical entropy. There was assuredly more to the process now that she had to contend with mass and gravity. The Idola Deus had lured her into a trap after all, albeit an unintentional one.

“I may need to borrow a boat,” said Yachie.

“You were flyin’ just fine when we fought you in Hell,” said Marisa.

“I didn’t have a body in Hell,” said Yachie. Irritation crept into her inflection.

“Ahh.” Marisa nodded thoughtfully, then slung her broomstick down from her shoulder and sat back on it as it began to hover. “Well, flyin’s pretty easy. The broomstick does half the work.”

Yachie fixed Marisa with a look of dull disdain. The suggestion did not amuse her.

“You’ve got to ease her into aesthetic shifts, Marisa,” laughed Keiki. She tapped Yachie’s hip as a realization came to her. “Oh! Marisa hasn’t seen my pleasure barge yet! Why don’t we—”

“I was hoping for something with a lower profile,” Yachie said.

“Yeahh, and I should get goin’,” said Marisa, drifting slowly backwards into the air. “Gotta save somethin’ for my next visit, right?”

“Well, until then. Take care, darling! Fly safe!” Keiki called, waving to the witch as she lifted off and sped away over the trees. An apprehensive silence fell between the goddess and the matriarch.

“I…” rumbled Yachie, looking up and away. “I want to thank you. For your hospitality, for these bodies, for… everything.”

“Oh, darling, you’ve already made it clear enough how you feel. But it gladdens me to hear it all the same.” Keiki stepped closer and rested her head on Yachie’s hip. Yachie felt the urge to reciprocate the gesture but found herself with her hands full. She sunk to a knee and bent to place a kiss to the top of Keiki’s head, between her concealed horns. Keiki turned her head up in response, wrapping her arms over Yachie’s neck to lift herself into a kiss. Yachie greeted her lips with a flick of her tongue.

After a tender moment, Keiki pulled back and chuckled. “And you still don’t want to be seen on the pleasure barge of Keiki Haniyasushin?”

“It’s political, I’m afraid,” rumbled Yachie. The days and nights in Keiki’s sanctum already felt like an indulgent reverie. Her mind conjured visions of the oncoming mountain of organizational work sure to have piled up in her absence. She would not allow herself for an instant to regret it, but she allowed herself to entertain the doubt that she had been too long away. “That sort of thing makes a statement.”

Keiki gave her a dubious smile. “Any more so than strolling down Binturong Avenue with two original masterworks of Haniyasushin cybernetic thaumaturgy?”

Yachie chuckled wryly. “Yes, if you’ll believe it.”

Keiki laughed. “Regardless, darling, it was lovely to have you. I hope to have you back when I’ve finished more features to test.”

Yachie planted a kiss on her forehead and stood. “I don’t mind clearing my schedule for you.”

———

Despite Keiki’s implication, Yachie was not taking Binturong Avenue back to Kiketsu headquarters. There were too many eyes on Binturong and she was conspicuous enough. She had disseminated her intention to commission these bodies to her own organization, but there was a chance the rival families were still ignorant of her new capacities. She was halfway back home along Tiragyoni backstreets when she heard the jingle of spurs from a nearby alley.

Her gaze snapped to the shadows. Her threat instincts raced for analysis. An all-too-familiar winged centaur. Hat dipped low, fringed leather vest and plaid shirt on her humanoid torso, wide tartan skirt draping over her midnight-furred flanks like a warhorse’s barding, hooves muffled by two pairs of embroidered cowboy boots. Saki Kurokoma, matriarch of the Keiga family, stepped to the mouth of the alley.

“Y’just gonna mosey on by without sayin’ howdy?”

“Saki,” rumbled Yachie. Her instincts screamed within her. She regulated them with the security of her massive size. She was finally taller than Saki, and now likely had strength to match her. “We’re both busy women. Let’s keep this quick.”

“Won’t take long,” said Saki. She tipped her hat back, craned her neck up, and sauntered forward. Yachie’s threat instincts extrapolated violence from the Keiga matriarch’s every slightest movement. Saki continued. “Seems to me you’ve been spendin’ an awful lot of time around the Primate Garden, Kicchou.”

Yachie’s heart thundered, but she met Saki’s gaze with a cold reptilian glare. She gestured briefly with the bounties both of her arms held. Their origins were evident. “I have.”

“‘Bout the only lick of sense I thought y’ever had was your taste in boots.” Saki stepped closer still, running her gaze up and down Yachie’s hulking new form. Yachie held her ground. Saki locked her gaze aggressively with her rival matriarch. “Reckon since you can’t wear ‘em anymore you’re just lickin’ ‘em.”

Yachie whipped her tail under Saki. The pegasus toppled with the unexpected sweep to her legs. In a blink, Yachie planted a taloned foot on her neck.

“Let me make this excruciatingly clear, you ten-gallon imbecile,” Yachie snarled. She dredged up every ounce of venom within her soul and weaved it into her words. Dire venom that turned the heart traitor.  _ “I am not your enemy.” _

Horrible gurgling noises rose from the pinned matriarch. Yachie knew exactly how it felt to have your spirit losing ground against an encroaching body not your own. She felt a terrible inertia as the words rose within her. A promise that would let the venom take hold. A promise that would narrow her own course.

“With these bodies, Haniyasushin has given me the key to her own undoing. Have patience. You will see me strike her as  _ you _ have never managed.” 

Saki’s thrashing turned to shudders, and laughter billowed up through her gurgles. Yachie felt sick. Sick from the adrenaline, sick from the spectacle, sick from the promise. She eased her foothold on Saki. The Keiga matriarch pushed off Yachie’s claw and rose to an equine crouch. She wiped a trickle of spectral blood from her mouth, laughing all the while.

“You got strong, Kicchou,” said Saki. Her voice sounded harsh and shredded as her spirit reasserted its form. “Guess strength is strength after all, even when it’s just borrowed.”

Scurrying echoed from down the street. Masu led a handful of otter spirit grunts around the corner and skidded to a stop. The gharial lieutenant reared back on her haunches, clasped her front claws in front of herself, and bowed apologetically.

“Boss! Please allow us to accompany you back to headquarters!”

“Better not keep us waitin’, pardner,” growled Saki. Neither her gaze nor her posture acknowledged the reinforcements. Her attention remained sickeningly devoted to Yachie. “I like to run my gals hungry. Been a while since we last ate.”

“It’s a poor leader who can’t feed her followers, Saki.” None of her inner turmoil showed on Yachie’s serpentine face. It took every bit of her steel will to circle dismissively past Saki. She had to trust that her venom had taken hold. If it hadn’t, the whole street would have already spiralled into animalistic violence.

Saki squared up in the road behind her as Yachie walked coldly to her waiting reinforcements. The Keiga matriarch burst into laughter again, laughter that was taken up by a pair of hyena spirits who slunk out of the same alleyway Saki had appeared from.

“I like how they fight when they’re hungry,” said Saki. She rolled her shoulders with a feral grin. “Mighty fine lieutenant you got there.”

Yachie joined Masu and gave her a nod. She turned her gaze back down over her shoulder. “Good day, Saki.”

Saki tipped her hat. “Y’can’t be everywhere, Kicchou.”

Yachie turned and walked away, her underlings falling in behind her. Saki and her pack watched her go.

———

They reached the Kiketsu headquarters with little further incident. Bending through the lobby doors, Yachie straightened to her full height in the atrium as Masu and her otters filed in after her. The matriarch still brimmed with restless, venomous energy from the burst of conflict. She expected to feel relief when she crossed the threshold, but what relief she gained from familiar territory was complicated by new ergonomic considerations.

“Thank you for your support, Masu,” said Yachie.

“We found you as fast as we could, boss,” Masu saluted. “Don’t know how that Keiga bastard tracked you down so quick.”

“It’s best not to underestimate her,” said Yachie. She looked to the elevators at the far end of the lobby and grimaced subtly. No chance that her body would fit in one of them. “Has Iwashi reported back yet?”

“Not yet,” said Masu. “I’ll send her up when I see her.”

Yachie filtered the guilt from her voice. “How were things while I was away?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle, boss.” Masu gave a long grin, then glanced away. “Sure, it was short notice for a vacation, but you’ve been working hard, y’know?”

“I’ll pencil them into the calendar next time. Call the elevator for me, would you?” Masu scurried to comply. Yachie was finally feeling a hint of fatigue from carrying her load across the city. She strode across the lobby after her lieutenant and waited for the elevator. When the doors opened, she bent down and stuffed her spare body and the basket of groceries inside.

“Send those up to the penthouse, please.”

Masu’s gaze darted between her matriarch and the elevator. “You’re not gonna try to squeeze—”

“I’ll meet you up there, lieutenant.”

Yachie turned and left the lobby and its quietly gawking underlings, returning to the street. She cast her gaze up her headquarters’ facade of steel, glass and concrete. It was thirty floors to her penthouse and her body begged for exertion to burn through this restless energy. The corner to the right of the main entrance would bring her up onto her penthouse’s wide balcony. Past the imposing facade of the three floors above street level, there were decent handholds every floor. She limbered up her arms.

It was a shame Keiki wasn’t present for such a daring improvised test.

Yachie launched herself up the side of the building. Her initial leap carried her halfway up the street level facade. Her claws punched into the concrete to catch herself. From that purchase, she pushed for another leap. She never paused for more than a heartbeat as she flowed up the first fifteen floors, legs kicking, arms pumping, claws digging for steady purchase. Her pace slowed past the halfway point as her initial burst of momentum flagged in the face of gravity, but she buoyed herself onwards and upwards with sheer determination. Her muscles burned at the continuous rhythm and it brought her a single-minded focus.

On the twenty-ninth floor, she paused and spared a glance into her meeting room. Sitting behind the low teak table, Uni tapped a sheaf of reports as she addressed a pair of underlings. The sea otter spirit must have caught the movement — whether from Yachie’s sudden climb or her silk dress fluttering in the breeze — because her eye widened and she stopped mid-sentence. The fishbone toothpick slipped from her mouth. Yachie grinned, then heaved herself up the last bit of distance to her penthouse balcony.

She really needed to learn how to fly again.

Yachie bent through the patio doors and caught her breath inside. She was home again, such as it was. It felt cold and austere. When the kilns roared in Keiki’s sanctum, the whole space radiated with warmth and purpose. In contrast, Yachie’s aerie felt more akin to a tomb fit for a sky burial. It had never been  _ lived _ in. Still, it was never too late to start. She let herself release the tension that had built in her since she had left the Primate Garden.

Across the open central space, the elevator chimed softly. The doors parted to reveal Masu fretting next to Yachie’s slumped, empty form and the basket of food. Her lieutenant yelped when she saw Yachie’s massive figure looming in the darkened penthouse, but recovered herself quickly.

“Boss!” Masu stammered. “I was just staying in the elevator on account of I’ve got no body to move these things you left in it.”

“That’s perfectly sufficient, lieutenant.” She leaned down to haul out her spare body and the basket. Masu stepped gingerly into the penthouse after her. Yachie set the basket on the kitchen counter and her body on a couch, then turned and spread her claws inquisitively to her lieutenant. “But truly? No backlog for me?”

“We stayed on top of things!” said Masu, letting her crocodilian frame swell with pride. “I mean, sure, we didn’t know if you were coming back for a minute there, but wow! You were right, boss, what a payoff!”

Yachie couldn’t help but grin. “Glad to see I haven’t misplaced my faith in my lieutenants. For our next order of business, increase surveillance on the Keiga. Allocate five more teams to this, but keep discretion paramount.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Masu saluted and scurried back to call the elevator. As she stepped inside, she turned and winked. “Great to have you back, boss.”

The elevator doors closed and left Yachie alone with her thoughts once more. Part of her had almost been  _ hoping _ for a deluge of paperwork to immerse herself in. It would have staved off for a bit longer the emotional turmoil Saki’s presence inevitably brought with it. It would have distracted her from all the ways her own home was subtly inhospitable. In her present form, all her furnishings felt simultaneously too far apart and too small.

Yachie sighed. She found a stretch of wall tall enough to hang her dress from — there was no way it would fit in her closet. Slipping it from her body, she mounted it to the wall like a banner. It added a splash of color to the room. Taking up her smaller body, she settled herself into a comfortable position on the floor and propped her empty self in her lap. It was a tight fit, but there was still enough clearance for her to slip a clawed digit into the gap between shell and flesh. The entry glyph flared.

That same spiritual wrenching, that same asynchronous awakening. This time the threshold seemed to compress her as her spirit passed through. There was a flickering moment, stretched between two bodies, where she met her own gaze. She looked tired.

She was through. Her massive body fell dormant and cooled even as she extricated herself from its lap. She found herself thankful she had worked herself so hard climbing the building. Had she tried to fit her full energy back into this smaller body she’d be brimming with it to the point of discomfort. Instead, she felt physically fresh — this body hadn’t taken part in the afternoon’s exertions — but she still carried an emotional exhaustion.

She needed a change of clothes and a shower. She felt burnt out. She felt  _ hungry. _ She looked at the state of her suite’s neglected kitchen and nearly felt like crying.

Yachie had just started to reorganize her kitchen when the sound of fluttering fabric and boots touching deck sounded from her balcony.

“Oyy!” called Marisa, casually slipping through the patio doors. “Almost flew off with your lieutenant.”

Yachie sighed. She procured two glasses and a bottle of scotch from her liquor cabinet — it was the one section of her kitchen that had seen any appreciable use as a spirit.

Once inside, Marisa took a theatrical breath and made a face. “Ugh. I was hopin’ your place also had whatever Keiki’s got that makes the air better down there. Like some kinda… air… conditioning.”

“Believe me, I’m looking into it,” said Yachie.

“In the meantime, crack a window, will ya?”

“It wouldn’t help.”

Marisa leaned her broom by the door and sauntered through the living room towards the kitchen and her waiting drink. She cast her gaze over the sparse decor. “Damn, you really live like this, huh?”

“It’s minimalist,” growled Yachie. She took a sip of her scotch. It was remarkable what a body did for the drink.

“Never been one for minimalism,” said Marisa. “Too easy to spot when things go missing.”

“You’re here for your payment, I presume?” asked Yachie, flicking her tail idly.

“Oh, for sure. One sec, though,” said Marisa. She strode past the kitchen counter and braced herself at the sink. Yachie averted her gaze. There was an unpleasant wet sound as Marisa sneezed out an entire otter spirit.

Iwashi scrabbled up in the sink and turned the faucet to pour cold water on herself. She squeaked out a noise halfway between a sigh and a shriek. “Kyaaaah! Miss Kicchou, I was so scared! I thought Haniyasushin was going to flip out and attack us the whole time!”

“Ahh, it was all good,” said Marisa. Her tone was bright and confident. “It’s like I told ya, Keiki’s chill when you aren’t tryin’ to kill her.”

“All I could think of was last time,” mumbled Iwashi, covering her eyes with her paws and slinking under the pouring faucet.

“You were fine!” Marisa rummaged through nearby cabinets with an irritating familiarity until she found another glass she could fill from the faucet to wash out the taste of ectoplasm. “Speakin’ of last time, I’m startin’ to think Reimu lucked out when she ended up with you. You’re way more chill than the eagle spirit I got saddled with. Absolutely rancid vibes on that one.”

Yachie cleared her throat. “There may be more paid opportunities for you in the future, Miss Kirisame.”

Marisa finished her water and gave Yachie a hungry grin. “All business with you, Kicchou. Whatcha got?”

“Well, immediately…” Yachie thought back to breakfast. She indicated the surrounding kitchen with a slow sweep of her glass. “I find myself in need of cooking lessons.”

“Cooking lessons, huh?” mused Marisa. She took up the tumbler of scotch Yachie had set out for her and started picking through the basket of goods from the Primate Garden. “These are all fine, but if you want the most powerful grub, you’re gonna want to spring for the poisonous stuff.”

Yachie downed her scotch and set the glass heavily on the counter. She spoke with a resigned forcefulness. “Well, I’m afraid it’s inconvenient for us to let you live any longer. It’s unfortunate, but…”

“Stop trying to poison Miss Kicchou!” cried Iwashi.

“Now, hold on!” said Marisa, raising her free hand defensively before her. “That was an advanced lesson! I can see we gotta start with the basics.”

Yachie narrowed her eyes coldly. “If I end up poisoned in my own home, you can consider your payment forfeit.”

“Don’t worry,” said Marisa. There was an unexpected warmth beneath her glad-handing tone. “I know plenty of folks who have a hard time taking care of themselves. I do this kind of thing all the time.”

Yachie resented the implication for its accuracy and for the fact that it was made in front of one of her lieutenants. Still, she felt a buoyant gratefulness to hear Marisa accept her offer. The witch’s assistance at breakfast had added an interesting character to the resultant meal.

“Miss Kicchou,” said Iwashi, paddling in a tiny circle in the plugged sink. “How do your new bodies affect our strategies going forward?”

Yachie suppressed the urge to sigh heavily. An interlocking web of obligation, appearances, and institutional inertia constricted her from all sides. Showing openly how it truly made her feel was a luxury. And in truth, the strategist within her had been scheming quietly since her venomous promise to Saki. “I’ll need some time to determine my full capabilities before I can give you an accurate strategic projection. But as for our course?” She poured herself another scotch. “Nothing has changed.”

Yachie couldn’t help but read disappointment in the fixed smile Marisa gave her. “Guess that’s what you really need me for again, huh?”

“I really do need to learn how to cook,” said Yachie. “No, Miss Kirisame, I will need you for nothing so direct as my previous scheme.”

“Well, good, because I like her. That’s an extra fee.”

“Next time, I hope to employ your skills in infiltration. There’s going to be a little something I’d like you to drop off when it’s ready.” Yachie gave her a cold smile. “Don’t worry. She expects this.”

“It’s not explosives, right?” Marisa grimaced. “That’s another extra fee.”

“You’re lucky money is on the table at all, witch,” said Yachie. “It’s not explosives.”

“Alright, alright. Only ‘cuz you’re payin’ me.” Marisa downed her own scotch and began to appraise the kitchen’s state. “What are you gonna do until this package is ready? Aside from cook, I mean.”

Yachie cast her gaze past Marisa, out of her wide windows, over the skyline of Tiragyoni Metropolis.

“I’m going to find out  _ precisely _ how big she can make me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> crack a window, will ya


	7. The Rule of Beasts

Mayumi Joutougu flew over the streets of Tiragyoni Metropolis. The glimpses she caught into the buildings around her revealed them empty of their usual bustle and feverish activity, filled instead with Haniwa archers waiting for her commands. The streets below rang only with the resonant clattering of terracotta cavalry deploying to their defensive positions.

“5th and 6th Fencers, continue the evacuation! 4th Fencers, hold the perimeter!” Mayumi’s orders carried with clear urgency over the winds, seeking her commanders with unerring precision.

The threat she faced today was dire. A gargantuan foe stalked the streets of her city, shaking the earth with every step. Buildings fell with a swipe of her tail, and arrows shattered fruitlessly on her ceramic shell. It was all Mayumi could do to evacuate the terrified denizens of the Beast Realm from the path of destruction. Despite the grim assessment of her forces and strategic projections, Mayumi would not allow terror to clutch her heart. Her heart was too full already with frustration.

This was a threat that could have been _ entirely avoided. _

“1st Mounted Archers, lure Kicchou to the intersection of 2100 East and Binturong Avenue! The streetcar along Binturong should delay her and give you some time. 2nd Lancers, form up on 2100 East and prepare to charge! You will be supported by the 4th Archers from their positions in the surrounding buildings.”

As Mayumi reached an intersection with the wide Binturong Avenue, she stole a furtive glance down its length. She was some distance yet from the rampaging Kicchou, but it still wouldn’t pay to advertise her presence. Her sharp eyes picked out the struggle from afar. She allowed herself a brief swell of pride when she caught the expert movements of her 1st Mounted Archers as they skirmished with the colossal matriarch. They danced from her claws and spurred her onwards with their volleys.

“Kicchou appears to be acting alone, but keep an eye out for opportunistic attacks from the other clans. 6th Fencers, be prepared to mobilize in response to any such attack and support where necessary.”

Mayumi had to credit her goddess for her craft. Yachie’s latest body was a work of breathtaking splendor at an impossible scale. Each scale of her ceramic hide was the size of a manhole cover. Each segment of her massive shell fit against its neighbor as if they had been molded and fired and glazed from one cyclopean mountain of clay. Her antlers were full-grown willow trees blooming from reinforced planters within her massive skull. A beard of interlocking scales dangled from her monstrous jaw, echoing like wind chimes or temple bells as they clattered together with her every movement. Her gait was low and fitfully quadrupedal. And despite the mechanical skill and inexhaustible bravery shining within Mayumi’s Haniwa soldiers as they faced her, arrows did _ nothing _ to Yachie’s new beastly form.

“Above all else, we are to prevent her from reaching the Primate Garden at all costs. 2nd Lancers and 4th Archers, prepare to strike on my command.”

Yachie lumbered closer, raking the cords of the streetcar from where they snarled against her limbs.

Mayumi drew her sword. “Now!”

Torrents of arrows broke against Yachie’s scales as the 2nd Lancers charged her. Mayumi spared a glance back to the Primate Garden. There was a splash of color on the closest shore. A beach umbrella? Mayumi cursed and stealthily retreated towards the lakeshore. The sound of hollow hoofbeats, shattering pottery, and deafening roars echoed from the skyscraper facades around and behind her.

Keiki Haniyasushin waved from her folding chaise lounge on the lakeshore as Mayumi descended to her. She sipped a fruity cocktail. Mayumi landed, sheathed her sword, and approached her.

“Hello, darling,” said Keiki. She looked tired, but unconcerned.

“Miss Haniyasushin, it’s too dangerous out here. I must ask that you please remain in your sanctum while we find a way to stop Miss Kicchou.”

“What, and miss the opportunity to see her latest body in action? It’s fascinating, don’t you think?”

“It’s…” Mayumi sighed in frustration. “Miss Haniyasushin, what I think is: _ why did you build her that? _ I don’t know how much longer we can hold her off!”

Yachie’s bellow rang out across the city as her flames licked the skyline. **“HANIYASUSHIIIIIIN!”**

Keiki gasped. “Fire breath? I didn’t install _ that. _ She’s making her own improvements! Incredible!”

“Miss Haniyasushin!”

Keiki lowered her sunglasses enough to reveal the bags under her eyes. “Oh, don’t give me that look, Mayumi darling. A little bit of hubris is good for the soul. Besides, I made you something too.”

The goddess snapped, and the ground started to rumble. The waters along the shore around her started to churn as a faint glow seeped up through the sediment. A line of some fifty armored vehicles crawled out of the lake on terracotta caterpillar treads, turrets forward in beautiful uniformity, shedding water and gleaming with arcane glyphs.

Keiki reached out to pat the closest track affectionately. “They’re called _ tanks _. Mayumi, let me introduce the 1st Armored Battalion. 1st Armored Battalion, this is your General, Mayumi Joutougu.”

“Miss Haniyasushin—!” Mayumi gasped. Her heart soared even as her strategic senses ran feverish recalculations. She found herself with the hope that the day could yet be won.

Keiki shifted her patting into petting. “This one’s just for you.”

“Comrade!” bellowed the tank in a jubilant voice. Painted on an armored panel of her chassis were words in a script unfamiliar to Mayumi: Боевая подруга. “Hop in! Boyevaya Podruga of the 1st Armored is ready for duty and the battle does not wait for us!”

“Have fun!” called Keiki, waving off her battalion. Mayumi leapt up onto Podruga’s chassis as the tank opened her turret’s hatch for her. She sank into the plush commander’s seat and marveled at the interior’s economic use of space and artistic blend of technology and thaumaturgy.

“1st Armored,” called Mayumi, “Forward!”

The 1st Armored Battalion moved to reinforce the Haniwa army. Mayumi found herself slightly overwhelmed by the number and complexity of the instruments around her, but despite this, there was something comforting about the rumbling pace of a tank. Thankfully, Podruga seemed self-propelled. There would be time after the battle to familiarize herself with the tank’s inner workings.

“Split into four companies,” Mayumi broadcast. “Two companies, reinforce the 2nd Lancers and 1st Mounted Archers at Binturong Avenue. Third company, flank along Mola Mola Boulevard and search for a target of opportunity. Fourth company around me. We’ll form a defensive line and reserve force. Move out.”

With her orders dispatched, she popped the hatch open to take in the city from tank-back. Thought the pace was slower than flying, the wind in her hair felt just as exhilarating.

“So, comrade Mayumi,” said Podruga, “Who is the foe?”

“Our enemy is Yachie Kicchou of the Kiketsu family. There may also be opportunistic attacks from the wolf spirits of the Keiga, though our non-mechanized forces are sufficient to repel them.”

“Wolf spirits? These are not fascists, are they?”

“No? I don’t think so.”

“Capitalists?”

“Kind of? I’m not sure.”

Podruga’s transmission rumbled. _ “Trotskyists?” _

Mayumi scratched her head apologetically. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You would know if they were.”

“They’re more like… gangsters. They used to prey on the human spirits down here before Miss Haniyasushin built her idols and the Haniwa army to protect them. Miss Kicchou is the matriarch of one of the primary organizations, the Kiketsu. Though attacking us directly isn’t usually her favored tactic.”

“Animal gangster ghosts!” Podruga laughed. “What kind of mixed-up afterlife have we found ourselves in, comrades?” The other tanks in their company laughed with her.

Mayumi found herself chuckling as well. It wasn’t so much that she saw the humor in the situation like Podruga did so much as it was that the tank’s good cheer was infectious. “Is it really that weird? I’ve only ever known the Beast Realm.”

“You have a tank now, comrade! You can see the world!”

“Really?” asked Mayumi. Her heart fluttered at the possibility, but reality drew her back. “Once we defeat the Families, maybe.”

“Of course! But you do not usually need tanks just for gangsters, no?” asked Podruga.

Distant roaring carried to them over the purgatory winds. “Miss Kicchou is currently attacking us with a giant monster body. There’s only so much the archers of the Haniwa corps can do against it. It’s an unusual situation. She usually uses subterfuge or sabotage.”

The tank whistled through an exhaust valve. “Where did she get that?”

Mayumi sighed heavily. “Miss Haniyasushin made it for her.”

“Hmm,” said Podruga. “These are the risks when you include criminal organizations in your revolutionary coalitions.”

“I’m not even sure that’s what this is.”

A sly tone entered Podruga’s voice. “Lover’s quarrel, maybe?”

Mayumi said nothing but blushed angrily. Tanks from their company split off in pairs to post themselves at cross streets as they trundled along.

Podruga broke the conversational lull. “Ah, what comrade Keiki said before, how she made this tank for you! I am sorry if you were looking forward to this body, comrade. It simply looked so inviting that I had to requisition it.”

“No, no!” said Mayumi. “I like the one I have. Miss Haniyasushin made this one for me, too. I’m not sure if I’d know what to do in one like yours. It suits you.”

“Thank you, comrade. That is a relief to hear.”

Mayumi ran her hand over a seam where the hatch opening emerged from the chassis. She could see Keiki’s touch in every contour of Podruga’s design. “Um. Miss Podruga?”

“Just Podruga is fine, comrade Mayumi!”

“Ah! Y-you can just call me Mayumi, then, Podruga! I was just going to ask, where are you from?”

“Ahh,” the spirit within the tank sighed wistfully. “A long time and many clicks from here. I was a T-34 born from a factory in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was born into a war that shook the very world of the living. Many of the girls who came here with me were much the same.”

“You came from a factory? But your spirit is so strong!”

Podruga chuckled with pride. It was a sound like an engine hiccuping. “I was built for a great hero! She lost the one she loved to the war against the fascists, so she gave me a name and imbued me with the spirit of vengeance. She cared for me through every battle.”

They neared the intersection Mayumi had determined would be their final line of defense. “What happened to her?” asked Mayumi, rapt.

Podruga paused. They reached their defensive position and settled in. “She… never saw the end of the war.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mayumi. “She sounds like she was a good person.”

“She was. I would not want you to meet the same fate.”

Mayumi smiled and gave Podruga a reassuring pat. “Then let’s look out for each other out there, Podruga.”

“Of course, Mayumi,” said Podruga. “I am maybe a quick judge of character, but you remind me of her.”

Mayumi blushed. Distant roars and cannon fire echoed over the city. The forward companies had now engaged in combat. “Really?”

“She was also a warrior of love and justice.”

Mayumi didn’t know how to respond to that. She scanned the street ahead of them for the faintest sign of activity. “You think I fight for love?”

Podruga laughed boisterously. “It is all over your face, Mayumi!”

“I just—” Mayumi sputtered. “I just don’t know what she _ sees _ in that beastly lizard! I don’t know why she keeps trying to _ help _ her!”

“You think she is still worthy of your loyalty?”

“Yes!”

“Her cause and your cause, they are still the same?”

“Of course!”

“It is good to nurture a mutinous spirit,” said Podruga. “It is good to have room to be critical of your leaders and your loyalties. And if they remain worthy, then it is good to trust them.”

Mayumi sighed. “I should just talk to her, I know.”

“You know, the strengths that such a beast could bring to your cause should she be successfully radicalized—”

“Enemy spotted!” The call came from two streets down the line their company had formed through the city.

“Fourth company, move to engage! Go, Podruga!” Mayumi responded. She gave Podruga’s chassis an encouraging thump and ducked back inside, shutting the hatch behind her.

“All right!” barked the tank. Her voice swelled with excitement and her treads churned against the asphalt. “Time to show you why Fighting Girlfriend is the best kind of girlfriend!”

Mayumi felt her face flush as she loaded a shell into the breach. “Your name means—?”

Boyevaya Podruga’s laughter rang through the streets of Tiragyoni Metropolis.

———

Arrows poured from her impervious scales like mountain springs in the thaw. Lances crashed against her thigh and splintered. A sweep of her tail tossed aside the impudent cavalry. Within her was a Xanadu of clockwork and arterial steam. She was a temple, a fortress, a factory whose every streamlined output was destruction. With her titan steps the foundations of the earth trembled. Her screams thundered to the heavens she had never known. What was the self in the body of a god?

It was too much, it was too much. She could lose herself in the labyrinthine viscera of this machine. It wasn’t enough, it was never enough. She clawed for control of herself as she clawed for control of the world. The world slipped from her reach, but not her self. She had marked this body. This body was _ hers. _ She, Yachie, _ she _ had stoked the flames of Hell within her own furnace-guts. Every time she spilled the flames from her maw she felt the path-function of spirit ejection shape itself in her mind like a siren song. This was a consequence of her own design. She, Yachie Kicchou, _ she _ had willingly inflicted this upon this body, upon herself in this body, as the price of power. Yachie had not made this body a god but she had made this god into a weapon.

For she was a god of _ fury. _

Fury at everything that constrained her. Fury that she’d died never knowing another of her kind since the dragons fled to Heaven. Fury that this lowly corner of purgatory was nothing but fight after fight after fight. Yet this body that could tear away streetcar lines like silk negligée was not enough to tear through every institution and obligation that had forced her to turn this body against its creator.

Was this true divinity? Was it merely borrowed? But this body was not _ borrowed. _ This body was _ given _ and _ made hers. _ It was exhilarating and harrowing in equal measure. Yachie didn’t know how long she could stand it, nor did she know the slightest what it would do to her metaphysical composition should she exit it. What had Keiki _ wanted _ to do with this body? Surely she had never wanted it to butcher her automaton cavalry.

Cannons thundered ahead of her. Catastrophic wrongness blossomed from the impacts — sudden numbness as scales shattered and sloughed away. Her body felt no pain but had other senses to communicate bodily peril. Fear augmented her titanic fury. Keiki had not built this body as a weapon. Keiki had built her _ own _ weapons.

This Yachie knew as a new barrage cut into her right flank from a side street: tanks, in sufficient number, with proper positioning, could kill a god.

She belched flames in volcanic desperation. Tears steamed from her stained-glass eyes. As her inferno poured over the defending tanks they burst from the heat, sending fragments of hardened ceramic scything through the surviving cavalry. Fragments of silent, soulless soldiery sank into the melting asphalt. Her flames sputtered, but the street still burned. She felt pieces of herself along the chute from her furnaces to her maw melting to slag, trickling down her numbing throat. Perhaps her design had more consequences than she had known.

Yachie toppled a building to spill across the street and block the line of fire from the flanking tanks. They would have to restrict their targeting to her hardened shell or reposition through the wreckage in her wake. It bought her time. Time she needed — a new line of tanks appeared ahead of her. At the vanguard, sword unsheathed, standing atop the barrel of the emblazoned tank she rode, was a figure in yellow armor and white ribbons.

She had drawn out Mayumi Joutougu. Her commands rang across the kilometer of abandoned street.

“Fourth company, sight targets! Forward, and fire on my command! After first volley, fire free!”

Here she was. Hero of the city, the Primate Garden’s light of hope. Keiki’s friend, charging her with a line of tanks. Yachie, in the body of a god, sent a small prayer that the rest of her scheme was on schedule.

“Fire!”

The cannons thundered. They dug into her hide. A wing of her beard fell free and rang against the ground like the bells of a burning temple. This was at their _ maximum effective distance. _ Yachie charged forward over the burning no-man’s land to close the distance. She scooped up the smoldering husk of a tank and hurled it ahead of her. Two tanks on the right flank broke formation to dodge, but the shattering debris damaged their tracks. They dropped from the charge, but their cannons still rang. Numbness bloomed in her shoulder as one shell pierced through weakened scales.

Across the stretch of burning rubble and into the next intersection, Yachie lurched evasively left onto a wide enough side street. Cannonfire burst against the concrete facade before her and the building behind her. She reached back to the stricken building — a Gouyouku front, she knew — and toppled it into the intersection, spilling rubble diagonally into the street and narrowing the space the tanks could approach. She braced herself up against the covering building and waited.

Three tanks rounded the corner. None were the lead tank. Yachie plunged on them shell-first. Even as they crumpled beneath her, the surviving tanks further up the avenue tore into her. She rolled to her side, turning her shell to the barrage as she rose and ducked away down the cross street. Now Mayumi had five tanks to pursue her with. Five more in reserve. Another company repositioning, perhaps to join the chase and perhaps to flank again.

Yachie gouted flame beneath her as she retreated, turning the street into a superheated morass. Treads churned and mired behind her. Shells ricocheted from her shell — her armor was strongest in back. She spared a glance behind her. Four tanks struggled against the molten asphalt. The lead tank was not among them. 

She reached another intersection and made to dodge left again, away from the Primate Garden, back along her wake of destruction. A shell smashed into her right cheek. There was no pain, only terrible pressure. Her vision fragmented as a few panes burst from their proximity to the blast. Mayumi had set her own ambush. She was alone with her tank, but several blocks behind the General her 4th company’s reserves rushed to reinforce her.

Yachie roared in fury and tore up a streetlight to hurl at the emblazoned tank. Mayumi leapt from the hatch and sliced the streetlight in half in midair. The steel halves tumbled past her, deflected from a killing strike to a glancing blow. Even this was enough to decouple the track of her tank.

“Fire!” Mayumi cried. Yachie reared back as a shell struck her neck and four more thundered into her back. The Brigadier General sprung into the air again, soaring directly for Yachie’s stricken neck.

This body was dying. She felt gears grinding themselves out of position and muscles locking from ruptured valves deep within her. But she knew a furnace still raged in her molten guts. She could loose it. She could drown this block in cleansing fire as she screamed herself to slag. Or she could do what her instincts begged for her to do as the fires rose inside her — _ just leave. _ Let Hell die within her as Mayumi struck home her impending deathblow.

The way was so clear. Surely it had been enough time.

Yachie dredged up the will through the numbness and havoc. She sank the intention home. Steel flashed. She tore herself free from a dying god.

———

“Uni,” said Yachie. The empty bottle lay beside her on the couch. Another waited on the coffee table. She knew it was bad. Uni was letting her pet her, it was that bad. “Have I told you about her hands, Uni?”

“Tell me about her hands,” said Uni.

“She could make you melt with them. I don’t know how she does it.” She knew how she sounded. Her roars had made the city foundations tremble. Her spirit’s voice was a whisper in comparison. Especially without a body to hear it from. She didn’t feel particularly deserving of a body at the moment.

“Must be the thumbs,” said Uni.

“I have thumbs,” said Yachie. She scratched behind Uni’s ears in demonstration. If she had been in a body, they couldn’t share the half-touch of spirits. It was a shadow of touch, but she was a creature of the shadows.

“Must be something else then,” said Uni.

“What does she have that I don’t? Why does she keep giving things to me but I still don’t have it?” She knew she sounded exactly as miserable as she felt. Uni was her oldest lieutenant. She had seen Yachie like this before. Uni passed her the bottle of sake and she pulled.

“I still don’t have it,” croaked Yachie. “What do I do next? God, what do I do next? I’m finished.”

“Yachie, come on,” said Uni from her lap. She took the bottle back and returned it to the coffee table. “You don’t mean that.”

“Then what do I _ do _ , Uni? I can’t see it. I can’t think of it. I’m finished.” Then again, she had never lost a body before. Uni hadn’t seen her like _ this. _

“Yachie,” said Uni, shifting upright, “Kirisame’s here.”

Yachie looked up dully to see the witch tromp across her living room, snatch the sake from the table, and fling herself heavily in a chair next to the couch. “Dropped off your fuckin’ package. _ Discretely.” _ Her voice dripped with irritation. She pulled from the bottle.

“Hah,” said Yachie. Ghostly tears beaded at the corners of her eyes.

“The fuck’s her problem?” grunted Marisa. She passed the bottle to Uni. “Everything on my end went off without a hitch.”

Uni snatched the bottle and growled. “You saw the body she just lost.”

“Yeah, real sad you went and wrecked it,” said Marisa. She waited for Uni to take a drink, then grabbed the bottle back. “I’m not stupid, ya know. That wasn’t no care package you sent me with. That was a real nasty piece of work.”

“It was a mercy,” Yachie’s voice was low and grave. Her claws lay open and unoccupied in her lap. “It was a mercy.”

“Do yourself a favor. Don’t make me do that again.” Marisa punctuated her request with another pull of sake.

“Blame Saki,” Yachie slurred.

“Oh, it’s her fault? Then why not take it out on her instead of your own damn self? You had a giant goddamn monster body!”

Yachie fixed Marisa with a dead-eyed stare. “I’d have to catch her first. You know damn well how fast she is.”

“Then go after her shit! Y’ain’t gotta go after Keiki!”

“You trying to egg us into a gang war?” Uni snapped as she accepted the bottle from Marisa. “You know how many paws on the ground the Keiga have? More than we do. It’d be a goddamn massacre.”

Marisa blinked sulkily. “Guess you don’t wanna die _ again,” _ she muttered, slinking down in her chair and crossing her arms.

“Marisa,” growled Yachie. She plucked the bottle from Uni’s grasp. “Functionally, I just died again.”

“No wonder this victory party feels like a fuckin’ wake,” grumbled Marisa.

Yachie stood unsteadily and worked her way to the kitchen counter, passing the bottle to Marisa as she drifted by. She returned with a black attaché case that she slung heavily to the coffee table. “Your payment. Don’t let us keep you if you don’t like our _ vibe.” _

Marisa sighed and set the bottle back on the table. She didn’t rise just yet. “I really did think y’all had a cute thing going together, y’know. I was hopin’ one of these days we could’ve all headed over there and made a big meal for her or somethin’. Show her what I taught ya.”

Yachie looked away. A ghostly tear fell soundlessly to her carpet. “I don’t want to hurt her.”

“Well, you did,” said Marisa.

“I know,” said Yachie.

“This mean we’re going legit, boss?” said Uni. There was always a hint of playfulness when she called her ‘boss’.

Yachie chuckled ruefully. “No, we’re not going legit. I just don’t want to hurt her.”

Marisa grunted and stood up, then picked up the case. “You sound like you need a vacation, Yachie.”

“Maybe I do.”

The witch grinned warmly. “Well, y’know, we got an onsen up on the surface near the shrine. Me n’ Reimu had it made a few years ago. Come on up sometime.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone please give a warm welcome to the newest touhou girl, Fighting Girlfriend! Fighting Girlfriend was a real t-34 helmed by sgt. mariya vasilyevna oktyabrskaya, who was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union after succumbing to wounds received in battle. now you know


	8. Face to Bloodshed

When her great body fell, so much smoke had blocked the skies that for three days it rained a black sludge over the awestruck metropolis. It choked the gutters with sodden ashes and coated every ruin and husk and potsherd in grime, as if the Beast Realm itself sought to remind its denizens that they dwelled in purgatory. Then it had merely rained for another three days, as if the Beast Realm remembered that it was mere purgatory, and not Hell. Today, as if the Beast Realm remembered that a purgatory is not without hope, the rains had let up into a fitful drizzle.

Yachie felt better, though the city would take some time to rebuild. With the weather letting up, she took the opportunity to arrange a meeting. The venue she selected was a quiet bar that had been spared from destruction. Naturally, it was a Kiketsu front, but the girls in charge ran it as a legitimate establishment. They put pride in their ambiance, service, and signature drinks, and it showed in the quality of the Bar Dunkleosteus. It was one of Yachie’s favorite branches, though she couldn’t help but speculate that she might have an inflated sense of its overall quality. They always put in extra effort for her visits.

Yachie sat at a large table in the back, nursing a coffee. In her human-sized body, she felt far too small, but the venue would have been unbearably claustrophobic in her largest surviving body. She had more outfits for this body anyway. For this meeting, she had selected a cropped leather half-jacket, a deep purple waistcoat, matching slacks, and a different pair of snakeskin cowboy boots.

An alligator spirit server set a shot of whiskey on the table and withdrew slightly, bowing deeply. “Compliments of the house, ma’am,” she said.

Yachie nodded towards her, never taking her eyes from the door as she poured the shot into her coffee. “Thank you. Nothing special tonight, girls. I’m expecting company. Get her order, then give us some privacy.”

Before long, the door opened to admit her expected guest. Keiki stowed her parasol as she entered. Her headwrap was clasped in place by a delicate bit of jeweled chainwork draped over her forehead. Around her shoulders was a shawl with a refined cut and an earthy tone. Beneath, she wore a forest green dress with an asymmetrical hem that dipped to her ankle at its lowest point. Owing perhaps to the weather, she had opted for riding boots. She scanned the gloomy interior. Yachie waved languidly, her curated expression one of neutral disinterest.

Keiki looked good. Of course, so did Yachie.

“This is a new spot for me,” said Keiki as she seated herself across from Yachie. “What do you recommend?”

“I think you’ll appreciate the Red Spider Lily. It’s a touch too sweet for my tastes.”

Keiki placed her order and the two waited in silence. The goddess busied herself with taking in the object of the bar’s namesake, a life-sized painting over the bar of an ancient plated fish. Though long since vanished from the living world, some still plied the currents of the far and formless Sanzu River, and it was those waters the artist had rendered around the lively fossil. Yachie kept an eye to the door, but stole glances at Keiki that the goddess seemed hesitant to steal back. The server returned with the drink. Keiki took a sip of the cocktail and made an appreciative noise.

“I understand it’s a berry liqueur that lends the drink its deep red hue,” said Yachie.

“I can taste it,” nodded Keiki. She set the glass down and turned her head slightly, still not meeting Yachie’s gaze. “I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to work on your bodies of late.”

Yachie smiled ruefully. “Understandable, given how I treated the last one.”

Keiki darted a glance to her, then back away. “Things keep cropping up. For example, you broke Miss Boyevaya’s track during your rampage. I had to repair it.”

“I don’t believe I know her,” said Yachie.

“Oh, you’re acquainted. She’s Mayumi’s tank.”

The roar of cannons. The flash of steel. Yachie blinked. “Well, did you repair her track?”

“Yes. Twice. The first replacement track disintegrated after five kilometers. She was in the middle of hauling away debris.”

“The roads are certainly worse for my efforts.”

“Her track  _ should _ have been suitable for a minimum of eighty kilometers of heavy use before servicing. So I checked, and it’s the damnedest thing. It seems someone used a foreign device to inject malicious code into my sanctum’s quality control measures.”

“You’ve got to be careful with back doors.” Yachie shifted in her seat and rested her head on her hand with a clawed finger extended up the side of her face. “How long did it take you to discover this?”

Keiki looked back and held her gaze longer. She simply looked tired. “That was three days ago. Then, of course, I had to determine when the code was injected. Then I had to organize a recall of everything I had made for the reconstruction efforts during the period of infection. Then I had to patch up that particular security flaw and cycle my way through its dependent permissions to verify it was patched. Then, wouldn’t you know, my neighbor invites me out to some sort of sapphic mafiosa bar.”

“Where do you find the time to sleep, my dear?”

Keiki blinked, and her mouth ticked into a sidelong smile that faded just as fast. “You know, darling, I simply can’t stand to sleep alone.”

Yachie dropped her hand to the table and sat up. An imperious frown hinted itself about her brows. “No wonder it took you a week.”

Keiki clenched her fists together in her lap as her voice rose slightly. “Of course it took me a week, Yachie. I’m one woman! My entire organization was reacting to and recovering from the consequences of your  _ feint, _ which, I might add, cost you one of my most advanced works to date!”

Yachie softened her expression back to a cool detachment. She had finally gone too far for Keiki. She was positive. She sipped her spiked coffee, then leveled her gaze back upon the Idola Deus. “How much raw productivity have you lost? Twelve percent?”

“I see your schemes are as well-researched as ever,” said Keiki. “Though thanks to the security patches, we should gain one percent of overall productivity when reconstruction is complete.”

“How heartening that I’ve led you to some bugfixing,” rumbled Yachie. This body’s rumble was but a shadow of the one twice its size, but at the moment she valued it for its expressiveness. “Keiki. A week to find my virus? A week of your worshippers wracked with the anxiety that their vessels might fail? A week of repair and recall for their  _ very bodies? _ Do you find that acceptable?”

Keiki smiled sadly. “You sound almost like you regret it. Aren’t you supposed to be better at masking your tone?”

Yachie leaned forward.  _ “Do you find that acceptable?” _

“No.”

Yachie breathed slowly. After a few halting moments she broke her gaze away. Her voice came low. “Didn’t you  _ want _ me to test you?”

Keiki turned away slightly as well, turning her gaze past the matriarch. She took a slow sip of her cocktail. “Yachie. What does it matter what your nemesis wants?”

“You arrogant fool,” said Yachie. “The entire point of having a nemesis is that  _ you care what she thinks.” _

Keiki smiled sadly. “So we really are nemeses after all.”

Yachie scoffed and dropped her arm to the table, turning back to Keiki. She didn’t bother to filter out her exasperation. “I don’t know what we are anymore. Forgive me for developing an emotional attachment to someone after I’ve  _ bred  _ her.”

Keiki blinked heavily. A faintly bemused smile threatened to surface. “Did you have to phrase it like that?”

Yachie lifted her palm plaintively. “Did I speak inaccurately?”

“No, I suppose not,” said Keiki. She gave a silent chuckle. The brashness of Yachie’s statement seemed to have shaken some of the ice from her demeanor.

Yachie truly softened her gaze. She slid her claw across the table in an open-ended offer. “You said you wanted me to come to you if I had problems. I have a problem. I’m coming to you.”

Keiki took a soft breath, then joined her hand forward. Her palm was slightly cool from her cocktail glass, but it was still her touch. “I’m stretched a bit thin, darling, but I’ll hear you out.”

“My problem,” said Yachie, lacing her clawed fingers through Keiki’s divine digits, “is with  _ you.” _

Keiki cocked her head and gave a sweetly strained smile. “Me?”

“What are you  _ doing, _ Keiki? You aren’t sleeping! You aren’t taking care of yourself and you’re damned well not taking care of your underlings!”

“You lost a body to my tanks and you’re preaching to me about self-care?”

“Listen to me! Your tanks were a  _ stopgap _ . My body was not a  _ feint. _ And you, Keiki, you sent your precious General into a fight you knew she would lose.”

“Did we witness the same battle? You inflicted some operational losses to our battalions, but in the process you suffered enough damage for catastrophic structural failure.” Keiki squeezed her hand. “For about a day I thought we had killed you, darling.”

“It should have never come to that! I have tasted your General’s strategies, Keiki. If she had known your  _ tanks  _ were reinforcing her, if she had truly known their operational capabilities, she would have maneuvered me into irrelevance from complete safety. Instead, I  _ spared _ her.”

Keiki blinked. “You are quite certain we witnessed the same battle.”

Yachie squeezed Keiki’s hand and brought her other claw forward to clasp over it. Her heart pounded with the memory of fire and battle. “You didn’t feel my  _ body, _ Keiki. You didn’t feel the obliterative strength in my every limb. You didn’t feel how my scales turned wave upon wave of arrows. You didn’t feel how my shell deflected a shot at  _ fifty meters _ with barely a dent and sent it skittering off to burst far above me. I could have taken her with me, Keiki.”

“No offense, darling, but you aren’t privy to the full extent of Mayumi’s capabilities.”

“I know when she’s not operating at them,” said Yachie. “She is a blade forged from your will and you’ve kept your will from her. When was the last time you trusted her with your vision? When have you last  _ talked _ to the poor woman?”

“Not since lunch,” admitted Keiki.

Yachie scoffed.  _ “Really _ talked to her. I know she translates her loyalty into strength. I faced her. Her loyalty is sinking slowly, Keiki. You bailed it out with your tanks, but the holes remain so long as she knows you share your bed with me, too.”

Keiki lifted her free hand to prop her forehead against it. She broke their gaze but made no move to retract her touch. “I’ve told you already, that’s not the nature of my and Mayumi’s relationship.”

“What does it matter? The consequences for her are the same so long as this decision of yours keeps twisting into her. It’s a flaw in her blade.”

Keiki sighed. She dropped her hand to join the others, nesting it around Yachie’s clasped claws. “Don’t put this all on me. You’re just as much a part of this.”

“Of course I am,” said Yachie. “I’m taking  _ responsibility. _ She’s of far more value to your cause. Let her build paradise with you.”

Keiki swallowed. Her hands trembled. “Does this mean the end of our little joint venture?”

Yachie found her own claws trembling in return. It hadn’t seemed like such a weighty question until it was voiced between them. She hadn’t thought the conversation would bring them here.

“Keiki Haniyasushin,” she said. “I cannot express to you what it means to have a body after so long denied one. Not simply a body, a  _ multitude. _ I cannot voice the joy your creations have brought me. If I take up an art I fear I will never create a piece that speaks to the profundity of my gratitude. I do not wish to walk away from this.”

“Nor do I,” said Keiki. Her voice was low and breathy with emotion. “So what does this mean?”

“I am saying that whether it is the end or not now hinges partially upon your General, Keiki. I am asking you to please, please, fucking  _ talk _ to the woman about this. Let her into your plans. This is my problem with you.”

Keiki laughed. “I will, darling, I will. It’s a promise. But why do you care so much about her?”

Yachie wormed a digit free of Keiki’s clasped embrace to point squarely at the goddess. “You were sloppy this week. If you aren’t in peak form, if your General’s strength falters, how are you going to foil my schemes?”

Keiki laughed again, this time tinged with disbelief. “Weren’t you just complaining a few weeks ago that you could never get one over on me?”

“That was before I saw the way you manage your staff,” said Yachie.

“I’ve always felt we could do away with more of the managerial class. Perhaps it is a blind spot of mine,” Keiki grumbled. When she brought her gaze back, it shone with a plaintive concern. “Regardless, why must I foil you? Why must you scheme against me?”

Yachie leaned back. She extricated a claw to take a sip of her coffee. It had grown lukewarm. It was still palatable, but she quietly regretted sending the servers away. She nodded to Keiki’s own drink, which had been similarly neglected during their exchange.

“Do you like your cocktail?”

Keiki took another sip and nodded. “I do. I’d rather like the recipe to make it at home.”

Yachie smiled conspiratorially. “Ah, but isn’t the ambiance of a meal crucial to its enjoyment?”

The goddess’s next sip was one she truly and visibly savored. “I still think I’d rather enjoy it at home, too.”

“Do you like that an establishment such as Bar Dunkleosteus was able to produce such a universally enjoyable cocktail?”

“Is this cocktail part of your schemes, darling?”

“I’m circling around my arithmetic, Keiki. Do you think the Keiga could nurse an establishment such as this? I will tell you: they could not. The Keiga run gambling dens and charnel houses. Do you think the Gouyouku would shelter this establishment under their wing, safe from the Beast Realm’s demands? They would not. The Gouyouku are vile and I would tear their wings from their bodies with my jaws if I could safeguard myself from the risk of disease.”

Keiki’s eyes twinkled with a bit of lascivious mischief. “What about your — no, never mind.”

Yachie scoffed. “Focus, you wicked god. I am the reason this establishment exists. It is my protection that keeps the wolves from the door. I have extended that protection because I happen to like fine little dives like this. It is not my strength that maintains this protection.”

The matriarch leaned forward and her tone grew heavy. “What keeps the Keiga at bay is the appearance that I am inflicting material harm upon the woman who has brought the most joy and fulfillment to my existence of anyone.”

Keiki said nothing, but squeezed the claw she still clasped.

“I spared Mayumi because she brings you joy. Because I knew I had already struck home the softer of two blows. The one I hoped you could bear. If I had suffered a moment’s uncertainty that I had failed to plant my code in your safeguards, I don’t know that I would have seen it as a choice.”

Tears beaded at the corners of Keiki’s eyes, glimmering in the faint light of her rippling aura. “It’s an unenviable position you’ve found yourself in, Yachie.”

“Tell me about it. Usually I like coming here to get away from my troubles.”

Keiki smiled fondly. “Well, I’m glad you brought them along. You’ve brought them to me, after all. Thank you.”

Yachie returned her smile. “Likewise, if you ever need management tips, you know where to find me. Remember: just because you know she’ll forgive you doesn’t absolve you from putting in the work.”

“I know, darling, I know!” Keiki laughed, and lifted Yachie’s claw to her lips to plant a kiss on it. “Now, tell me, what sort of appetizers has your protection guaranteed us?”

———

“It feels like ages since you’ve slept over.” 

Mayumi Joutougu paused in the middle of unbuttoning her blouse. Her armor already hung on a nearby stand.

“I’ve been spending most nights with Podruga,” the Brigadier General admitted.

“Of course,” said Keiki. The goddess sat on the edge of her massive bed. She had already slipped free of her dress and now shifted her focus to removing her undergarments. It was her habit to sleep nude. “I may have made a miscalculation in her design.”

“Miss Haniyasushin?” It was an unexpected response. Mayumi pulled out the ribbons keeping her hair up, then hastened to bring her own state of dress somewhere to parity.

“Not a lot of room to stretch out in her, is there? It must be cramped. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Ah, she’s got a nice chair. It’s not too bad,” said Mayumi. Truthfully, it wasn’t the most comfortable sleeping arrangement, but she liked the company and she didn’t want to worry Keiki more than she already had.

“How is her track holding up?”

“No problems so far.” Down to her own undergarments, Mayumi made to join the goddess she served.

“Good, good.” Keiki stood as she approached. She reached out and cupped Mayumi’s cheek. “Brigadier General Mayumi Joutougu. For your distinguished service and bravery in battle, it is my honor to raise you to Major General. You are the first to hold this position.”

Mayumi blushed but held her gaze. “Thank you, Miss Haniyasushin.”

“You don’t have to accept, of course.”

“No, I’m honored.” She was honored, but at the same time, the rank felt unreal. It was an unnecessary layer of abstraction between them.

“I still haven’t worked out how this would shift your responsibilities. You probably have a better idea of what it means than I do, with how much effort you’ve been putting into regimental restructuring.”

It was enough to hear her efforts recognized. She wrapped Keiki in a grateful embrace, resting her head on the goddess’s bare shoulder. She spoke quietly but happily. “I’ve been first to a lot of your positions.”

“You certainly have,” said Keiki. She returned the embrace. “We can hold an official ceremony whenever you’d like, but I wanted to tell you while I had you for the night. You mean so much to me, darling. Let’s get to bed.”

Keiki took Mayumi’s hand and helped her up onto the bed, leading her to the pillows. Though Keiki settled in with her customary ease, Mayumi found it difficult to find her spot again. It wasn’t just that it had been over a week since she last slept here — the nature of the bed had changed.

“What did she do to the mattress?” muttered Mayumi.

“I thought you’d rather not hear the details,” said Keiki. Her voice was soft and almost apologetic.

“Yeah.”

Mayumi lay on her back, staring up through the gloom at the canopy of ethereal fabrics overhead. Keiki lay at her side in a similar pose. She could hear the slither of fabric as her goddess turned her head slightly to ask her a question.

“Would you like different bodies, Mayumi? Like I’ve made for her.”

It was something Mayumi had been considering ever since she saw the Kiketsu matriarch jump from one body to another. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“There are any number of new features we could put in. Maybe an autocrossbow? A rocket punch?”

Mayumi laughed. “I don’t need a new body for those. You could put them in this one. I like my body.”

“True, but it’s so invasive. I’d hate to see you down so long.”

There was a deeper anxiety that tempered Mayumi’s curiosity at the process. She knew she didn’t have a soul. It was not an absence that particularly bothered her, but she couldn’t help but worry that it might complicate body-swapping. “Would it work for me like it would work for Kicchou?”

“Hmm.” Keiki lapsed into silent consideration.

“There’s a lot of things in this body that make me who I am,” said Mayumi. “I had a lot of free time to probe the shape of my consciousness right after we first liberated the human spirits. I know enough about it to know it’s interconnected with a lot of my functions. That my ‘self’ is an emergent phenomenon.”

“I’ve always loved that about you, darling.”

Mayumi turned her face to Keiki. The glow of her aura lit her soft smile. Mayumi followed her motion through and shifted her whole body to face Keiki. She clasped her goddess’s closest hand.

“I know there’s a spirit growing in me,” said Mayumi. “It’s not a soul, it’s something more. I know I can eject it and it’ll carry some portion of my self with it but — I don’t know what my self is outside of this body. I’m not ready to give up that spirit yet.”

Keiki turned her own body towards Mayumi. She reached out and ran a finger through her hair.

“I wouldn’t ask that of you.”

“Kicchou has that advantage on me,” sighed Mayumi.

“Kicchou has had  _ several _ advantages on us of late.” Keiki huffed irritably and turned her gaze to the ceiling. “I’ve been slipping. I’m sorry.”

Mayumi squeezed her hand plaintively. “I’m the one to blame. I left the Primate Garden open. My tactics — they were a mess. I should have—”

“You’ve done nothing wrong, Mayumi. You  _ won.”  _ Keiki turned back to her and softened her gaze. “I’m the one who wanted to keep my tanks a fun little  _ surprise. _ This is a struggle for liberation.”

“We’ve still kept the strategic advantage, at least,” Mayumi smiled. “She just has the advantage of retreat.”

“Would that we had that luxury. Where would we retreat to with our human spirits? The Netherworld won’t have us. Heaven’s gates are barred and guarded. Hell is collapsing under its own infinite bureaucracy. There can be no exodus for us. Here is where we must stay.”

“I wish we weren’t so alone,” admitted Mayumi. She scooted forwards, remembering where her spot on the bed used to be.

“I think we have allies everywhere in this struggle, but most of them are locked in their own systems of oppression,” said Keiki. “That’s part of why I’ve been trying to court Yachie.”

“You really think she can become our ally?” asked Mayumi. It was an intriguing prospect, but one with implications she needed time to consider. There were many implications she had been putting off considering.

“I hope so. Personally, of course, she interests me, I think we have a fun dynamic, and I find her insultingly attractive. Politically, that woman is a  _ threat  _ and I would sleep much easier if she was  _ our _ threat. I really do think she’s close.”

It was relieving in so many ways for Keiki to trust these feelings to her. Mayumi found her voice small even in the echoing hush of the bedroom. “You’ve never told me any of this.”

“I’ve been slipping in many ways, Mayumi. I’m sorry.” Keiki wrapped her arm around Mayumi and pulled her close in an apologetic embrace. Mayumi squeezed her hand in acceptance.

“I want there to be peace again,” said Mayumi. “I like having nothing to do. And militarily speaking, it’s far more efficient to ally with someone than to crush them with force.”

“Glad you understand. I’d love to coexist with the animal spirits, but so long as they see the humans only for their labor, we must struggle. The less bloodshed in that struggle, the better.”

The gush of oil, steam, and smoke flooding from her sword’s path through shattered scales. Mayumi blinked and brought her thoughts back to the bed and the arms of her goddess. “I don’t think Kicchou likes violence.”

“I think perhaps she’s beginning to find that she’s wielding a disagreeable sort of violence.”

“Disagreeable to herself?”

Keiki nodded. “Broadly speaking, there are two types of violence.”

Mayumi furrowed her brow. “The violence of beasts and the violence of humans?”

“It’s human arrogance to consider those categories mutually exclusive. They’d do well to remember that, it’s what led them to end up down here. No: violence to oppress, and violence to liberate.”

“Like when we freed the human spirits.”

“Precisely.”

“But then all the beast families started crying that we’d oppressed  _ them _ for freeing their slaves,” scoffed Mayumi.

Keiki laughed. “What is a liberation army but a special coercive force to break the hand that holds the chains? Yet they think we’ve simply taken up the chains again. We’ve smashed them, you and I. If we retreat from this, we invite their chains again.”

Mayumi pressed herself closer. “I hate that they would fight for that. How can we trust anyone who fought for that?”

“Well, let us consider the class character of the families. The Gouyouku are slavers made all the more pathetic by their pride. Flight, in death, is no longer their sole domain, and they seek to paper over this indignity with extracted labor. Reactionary to the core. The Keiga are obligate ectovores. They thought the Primate Garden was their private buffet before we struck out their fangs.”

“The Kiketsu used the human spirits like tools,” said Mayumi.

“Of course, and it’s loathsome. But the critical difference in their character came afterwards. When we denied them those tools, they adapted to other means. They are receptive to new techniques and adapt based on best information. If revolutionary information is disseminated to them, then perhaps they will recognize the need for atonement. Perhaps true reconciliation can come.”

“I don’t think I can trust Kicchou to do that,” said Mayumi, pressed softly against Keiki. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, darling. I don’t know that you  _ should _ trust her. I treasure your doubts.” The goddess squeezed her reassuringly.

“She’s not my type.” said Mayumi, with a sleepy chuckle.

“I won’t apologize that she’s mine, I’m afraid,” laughed Keiki. She rolled onto her back but stayed close. She had found her own spot in the bed again. She reached her free hand up into the bedroom air, as if to clutch at the open sky through the layers of silk, stone, wood, concrete, and purgatory. “There’s room enough for everyone in the paradise I want to build. I wish they’d see that.”

Mayumi followed her hand. She let her gaze drift down to her goddess’s face, eyes fixed on something beyond her grasp. She closed her eyes and draped herself around Keiki protectively.

“Until then, Lady Keiki, reach Heaven through violence.”


	9. The Shining Law

Of course the summons had come when she was carrying out inspections. Of course she’d left the body she knew could beat the Keiga matriarch at headquarters. Of course Saki would meet her _ there. _

“I’m tellin’ ya, boss, this whole thing stinks!” Masu kept pace with the Kiketsu matriarch as their entourage approached the meeting grounds. “We keep losing track of Keiga movements. How do we _ lose the Keiga?” _

“I hear you completely, Masu. That’s why you’re going to round up your fellow lieutenants and start reinforcing our key holdings while I determine Miss Kurokoma’s intentions.”

“Alone?” Masu gulped.

“Yes. Should worst come to worst, I can hold her here.” There was no guarantee of that, but should violence erupt, her people were at far more risk from Saki if they accompanied her.

Masu gave a clawed salute, nodded to her otters, and scurried away to carry out her orders. Yachie watched them until they rounded a corner out of sight. She adjusted her tie, rolled out her shoulders to feel the heft of her shell, smoothed out her suit, and resumed the walk to her corpse.

Reconstruction efforts hadn’t yet erased her rampage’s terminus. The headless ruin of her titan body slouched against a collapsed casino like a drunkard in a library’s stacks. The battered head blocked the ruined, quiet intersection. It felt like a memorial, or a shrine. Someone had woven rings of flowers around the trunks of the willow-antlers — there was a rumor among the city’s fairies that with the proper offering, the stricken god-machine would rise up once more and destroy the petitioner’s workplace.

The Keiga matriarch stood in the middle of the intersection, her back to Yachie’s approach. Her attention was focused on the massive severed head before her. Saki pawed at the ground idly with a booted hoof. The same wide skirt covered her flanks. An off-white bandana adorned her neck. She had opted for a black duster today, with holes for her raven-feathered wings. Her long black hair spilled between them in a ponytail to match her equine tail.

Yachie made no effort to mask her approach. Rubble crunched beneath her snakeskin boots, a telltale marker of physicality.

“Reckon it was just borrowed strength after all,” Saki called, back still turned.

“Everything’s borrowed, Saki.” Yachie replied. She stopped across the intersection. Already venom roiled within her, waiting to be dripped into her words.

“Wish I coulda borrowed this’n from you. I wouldn’t’ve lumbered around like some cheap mascot.”

“No, you would have plunged face-first into barrage after barrage of 76.2mm cannon fire.”

Saki looked over her shoulder and jerked her thumb at the scarred impact crater just beneath the great head’s shattered eye. “Whaddya call that, pardner?”

“A lucky ambush,” Yachie rumbled. “I don’t see you making your own opportunities.”

Saki chuckled. It was an ominous sound. Yachie had never shared her sense of humor. “We ain’t all so lucky that we get scraps from Haniyasushin’s table. Some of us are still out in the wild, pardner. We ain’t forgotten about the food chain.”

“Have you forgotten how many tanks I took with me?” Drop by drop, she wove in the venom. “How many have you accounted for, again?”

Saki stepped in a tight circle to turn to face Yachie at last. “Reckon it was about as many as my fuckin’ casinos you knocked over, Kicchou.”

“And you would have been so much more _ surgical _.” Her heart thundered sickeningly. Her throat burned with traitorous venom.

“Hell no, pardner!” Saki flexed her wings. It couldn’t have been anything but a threat display. “Woulda loved to smash up that fancy li’l penthouse of yours. But here’s the difference.”

She started across the street in a four-legged saunter. Her spurs jingled with every step.

“I ain’t need a fancy body to get you back for it.”

“I am not your enemy,” Yachie spat.

“Friends like these, huh?” Saki erupted in a gale of full-throated laughter, stopping in the middle of the rubble-strewn street. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye as her fit subsided. “Yachie, y’dumb bastard, you pulled that line on me so many times I done built up an immunity.”

Yachie nearly choked on the venom she bit back. It simmered in her like spiritual heartburn. It was no more use. All paths she saw stretching before her collapsed into violence.

“It’s war?” Yachie growled.

Saki grinned in response. She pulled off her hat and tilted her head back. A howl ripped from her throat, a sound from something far beyond human or beast. Wolf howls rose in answer, from every alley, every street, every borough of Tiragyoni Metropolis. They echoed from spectral, beastly throats gone too long unslaked.

Saki lowered her gaze back to Yachie and donned her hat once more. Below the howls came the fainter sounds of shattering glass and snarls. _ “Now _ it’s war.”

Yachie pulled off her suit jacket and hung it on a bent street sign. She approached the Keiga matriarch through the unearthly howls with a demeanor of icy disinterest. She would not give Saki the pleasure of seeing her fear.

“That’s what always pissed me off about that venom of yours, Kicchou,” called Saki, resuming her menacing saunter. “Yer always tryin’ to push the fight onto some other poor bastard. Well here’s another difference.”

Her wings snapped and in a heartbeat she was across the distance. The crack of forehead on forehead. Recoil from the blow cut short by her iron grip on Yachie’s necktie. Pain blossomed. Saki’s cruelly handsome face loomed and her hat brim cast them both in shadow. Her breath smelled of meat. “I love fightin’, pardner.”

Yachie hadn’t spent her weeks idle. She had relearned how to fly. She pushed herself into the air, catching Saki’s face with a full-bodied kick as she shot from her grasp. Leveling herself off in midair, she snapped her attention back to the pegasus matriarch. Saki had barely flinched. She returned Yachie’s gaze with a feral gleam as she wiped away a trickle of blood.

“Nice boots,” said Saki. She snapped, and searing points of energy slammed into Yachie’s shell from behind, forcing her back to the earth. Yachie contorted herself for a rolling landing.

“Them Gensokyo gals got somethin’ real sweet with them spell cards of theirs,” drawled Saki, coalescing glowing energy into her fist as she turned to track Yachie. “Them gals love to fight too. And strong! But I find myself thinkin’ — it ain’t for me.”

Yachie rose from her roll with her ruined head behind her. She dove forward to a rubble outcropping and took cover from the Keiga matriarch’s barrage of magic spearpoints. Something about Saki sent her tactical instincts into disarray.

“Where’s the _ blood?” _ said Saki. “Where’s the thrill of the kill?”

Yachie readied a counterspell. Perhaps there was a strategic way through. She rose and flung out scything ribbons of crackling energy towards the pegasus.

“Nothing’s ever _ good _ enough for you, is it, Saki?” Yachie growled. She leapt backwards to another outcropping of post-urban rubble, one chunk of cover closer to her stricken head. “You’re a god damn _ horse! _ What the hell do you know about this apex predator crap you’re peddling? Where do you think you are on the food chain?”

Saki called out from well above Yachie’s spell. “Y’ever been ridden by an endurance hunter? Ya pick things up.”

Yachie flinched away. The Keiga matriarch slammed hoof-first into the space she’d just occupied, cratering the road. Yachie rose and circled her at a distance too close for a jump and too far for a kick. There was a terrible inevitability to Saki’s kicks. It was no comfort that Yachie’s foe was a spirit — Yachie was a spirit too, and one with the dubious honor of having a body that could feel pain.

“Y’can’t make up your goddamn mind, Yachie,” Saki spat. “You had your chance to hit Keiki. Now it’s mine. You wanna hit someone, you come for something they actually care about.”

Yachie flung out a spray of magic needles but Saki was already moving, already there. She reared up and kicked. Yachie flung up her claw defensively and felt her entire forearm crack. She flew backwards. Her shell kicked up sparks as she skidded along asphalt.

“Me?” said Saki, sauntering forwards. “I’m gonna kill her lapdog.”

Yachie pushed through the pain. It was just information, information she had done without before. She felt gears jamming in her broken claw, frozen in position. She could still use her left. She had landed next to her goal. She hooked her claw into the seam on the massive neck where two manhole-sized scales fit together and lifted herself. She started to scrawl a glyph with shaking clawtips.

“You could have walked away,” growled Yachie, her voice shuddering in pain and loathing. “You could have minded your own fucking business. You started this war.”

Saki stretched her arms and wings wide with a cruel grin. “Somebody was bound to! You gonna fight? Or die like a dog?”

Yachie pressed her hand to the glyph. It was wrong, the body was dead, the ways were cut and melted and ruptured within her. But Yachie had left a back door. Gods didn’t die so easily. All she needed was to send a single impulse. Gears groaned and fluids gouted from the massive stump.

“Remember!” screamed Yachie, wavering between her battered body and Her severed head. “The ironclad law of the Kiketsu family!”

Her head surged forward in a shower of debris. Saki lurched away, but for once, Yachie was quicker.

Jaws like blast doors slammed shut.

She caught her. By the arm, by the wing. Yachie’s connection to the head severed and left her spiritually reeling. She toppled forward. The pain circled in. Her mind closed up to the sounds of ghostly howling and the fevered screams of the Keiga matriarch.

———

“Take the next left, Miss Boyevaya.”

Mayumi glanced up from Podruga’s gunner seat. Keiki stood out of the tank’s open hatch, blue hair fluttering under her wrap. They rolled along at a bracing 60 km/h through the eerily deserted streets of the city. The rumbling of Podruga’s engine and the hum of her turret’s inner workings mostly drowned out the unearthly howls echoing in the early evening air. Most citizens of Tiragyoni Metropolis knew better than to brave the streets when the Keiga were on the prowl.

But then, most Keiga knew better than to try their luck against even a lone tank of the 1st Armored. They drove through a bubble of deceptive calm. It was a relief to be by Keiki’s side in the chaos, but their destination still vexed the Major General.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t be on patrol, Miss Haniyasushin?” Mayumi lifted her voice over the engine.

Keiki ducked her head back in the turret to answer. “It’s enough to leave the Primate Garden defended, darling. This is an internal matter. We’re not here to police the city.”

That was certainly true, but what concerned her was what they _ were _ here to do. Keiki was taking them to a bar.

“Just up ahead, Miss Boyevaya. I’m afraid they don’t have seating big enough for you.”

“I am used to it,” laughed the tank as she slowed to park. Mayumi followed Keiki out of the turret and scanned the surroundings. The streets looked to be empty. Several blocks away, a few storefronts had been smashed. The howls still rang around them, but their distance was impossible to gauge.

Satisfied of their safety for the moment, Mayumi turned her attention to the venue. It had a tasteful brick exterior and wide windows into a gloomy interior. No one sat at the tables near the window. It was clearly a front, but not the sort of front Mayumi expected to find herself in on a night of the hunt.

“Bar Dunkleosteus?”

“Those armored fish, you know,” said Keiki. “From the late Devonian.”

Inside, it looked just as deserted. At the far end of the bar, the bartender and a few servers gathered in a nervous huddle. A big and somewhat muscular fairy with fox ears that Mayumi took for their bouncer stood as she and the goddess entered.

“Hello? Are you still open? I hope we’re not intruding,” said Keiki cheerily.

“G-go on in,” said the fairy, gawking at the tank parked outside.

Keiki led them to a booth near the center of the room. Mayumi seated herself facing the street and set up a small speaker in the middle of the table.

“Can you hear us, Podruga?” she asked into the speaker.

“Loud and clear, Mayumi!” came the tank’s voice, made somewhat tinny.

“Keep a look out for any Keiga,” said Mayumi. The order was largely redundant — Podruga’s presence alone was likely deterrent enough.

An alligator spirit detached herself from the gaggle to bring them menus and stumble over a greeting. “My name is Pike, I’m your server, can I get — uh, here are your menus.”

“I think we can start with an order of lotus root tempura, with the eel sauce. One Red Spider Lily for me. Mayumi, what do you think?”

“What’s a ‘saketini?’”

“V-vodka and sake?” Pike darted her attention between the window and the table.

“You would like that,” said Podruga through the speaker.

“Podruga, darling, anything we can order for you?” asked Keiki.

“What is your cocktail with the highest ethanol content?”

“Um,” said Pike. “I don’t— We don’t—”

“Do not trouble yourself,” said Podruga. “Just water is fine.”

The alligator spirit slipped away to place their orders. Every once in a while howls sounded close enough to filter through the entrance and make every employee jump.

“It’s kinda…” Mayumi strained for a compliment. “Cozy?”

“I don’t think we can blame them for the atmosphere tonight,” said Keiki.

“It is a shame there is no outdoor seating,” said Podruga. “Otherwise we could hold the next theory study group here.”

“Is this really the venue to talk about dialectical materialism?” asked Mayumi.

“There is no inappropriate venue to discuss dialectical materialism, comrade Mayumi.”

Snatches of hushed but fervent conversation drifted from the huddled servers. Mayumi couldn’t sense malice from the tone, but it didn’t change the fact that this was clearly a Kiketsu operation. She eavesdropped for the sake of her caution.

“Why is _ she _ here?”

“The boss already brought her here!”

“Yeah, but the boss ain’t here.”

“Wish _ I _ wasn’t here. Of all the nights to have to work.”

“Look, we can wait it out. None of you gals are goin’ home alone tonight.”

Pike returned with their drinks. She suffered a moment of indecision as she lifted the water glass before setting it in front of the speaker. Keiki smiled at her sympathetically.

“Sounds like you may have some overtime coming tonight,” said the goddess.

“Um.” Pike froze with the tray in her hand. She stole a glance back to her coworkers. “L-lady Kicchou doesn’t like us talking about our pay.”

“Oh, she _ doesn’t, _ does she?”

“I’ll take Podruga her water,” said Mayumi, excusing herself with her own cocktail and the water glass. She recognized the gleam in Keiki’s eye.

Outside, she thought she smelled smoke drifting in the evening air. Podruga’s turret whirred softly as she scanned the surrounding street.

“Three wolves came through the intersection with much bravado,” reported the tank with a chuckle, “but they did not like to see me. They slunk away.”

“Ah—” said Mayumi. “Where do you want your water?”

“In the radiator is fine. How is your saketini?”

Mayumi sipped her drink at last and almost coughed. “Oh, that’s strong! I like it. I wonder what the distillation process is like?”

“Must be a good vodka,” said Podruga. She flipped her hatch open and Mayumi climbed in to feed the water into her radiator. On the way back out, the Major General paused for another sip of her saketini in the commander’s chair.

“What is troubling you, Mayumi?” asked Podruga.

Mayumi sighed. “It just feels weird to be sitting around in a bar while the Keiga rampage through the city. I feel like I should be out there, stopping this, protecting people.”

“From our reports, most damage is still confined to Kiketsu holdings. They are sniffing around this one too.”

“I know, I know. They seem nice, for gangsters. I wouldn’t want them to get hurt. It just feels like such a passive defense.”

“You know, there is someone else you could be talking to about this. Thank you for the drink, Mayumi.”

Mayumi laughed and patted the console. “Keep your sights peeled, Podruga”

Back inside, the staff conversation had taken on an entirely different character. No longer was it hushed.

“What about the freezer? That thing’s on its last legs. We gotta—”

“When was the last time you had a day off? You can’t keep pulling these double shifts.”

“You know my girl can’t work. I gotta work for both of us.”

“Why come we gotta pay for food here anyway? It’s like, we’re the ones makin’ it!”

“Welcome back, darling.” Keiki sipped her cocktail with an innocent expression as Mayumi returned to their booth. “Have you thought of anything else you’d like to order?”

Mayumi took a breath. “Miss Haniyasushin, I still feel as though my presence would be of more use elsewhere in the city.”

“One doesn’t always have to be useful. It’s thorny out there, darling. If Yachie wanted our help with this, she would have asked us.”

“It’s not Kicchou I’m concerned with.”

“How would it look for the Haniwa Soldiers to come to the aid of the Kiketsu? Politically.”

Mayumi glanced out the window at Podruga’s reassuring bulk. “We parked a tank of the 1st Armored outside a Kiketsu bar already.”

“We are simply enjoying an evening at a charming local establishment in our capacities as private citizens,” said Keiki, gesturing airily with her cocktail. “It’s a show of solidarity, Mayumi. I assure you, ours is not an idle presence.”

“Lotus root tempura!” Pike returned with a plate of steaming tempura and a bowl of rich dipping sauce. She paused with her empty tray clutched before her and pitched her voice down. “Um. Ma’am? Are you making an offer on the bar? Because you should really talk to the owners about that.”

“That’s very flattering, darling, but I’m afraid I have my hands full. That sounds like a question you should be asking yourselves.”

The server silently processed the statement. Her eyes widened. She scuttled wordlessly back to her coworkers.

“My god, that’s scrumptious,” said Keiki, through a mouthful of tempura. “Mayumi, try this.”

Mayumi dipped her own piece and sampled it. The crispness of the light batter and the fried root played wonderfully with the tangy eel sauce. She dipped another immediately.

“There’s something very fragile, very precious that you’re protecting here, Mayumi,” said Keiki, lowering her voice and leaning over the table with a conspiratorial gentleness. “Can you feel it? It’s the spark of revolutionary consciousness.”

“Oh.” She found her heart pounding. There was a sudden clarity to her purpose, her presence, that gave her surroundings an entirely new context. She giggled. “She’s going to _ hate _ this.”

Keiki gave her a sly smile. “Mayumi darling, if she can’t handle me unionizing her underlings, it’ll never work out between us.”

A tinny noise like an engine backfiring in miniature came from the speaker as Podruga cleared what served as a tank’s throat. “Mayumi. Comrade Keiki. There is a group of Kiketsu enforcers approaching.”

Mayumi glanced out the window, then back at Keiki. She slid her hand over that of her goddess protectively. Keiki gave her a reassuring smile.

“It’s their bar, Miss Boyevaya. Let them through.”

“Do you think we’ll have to—” started Mayumi. Keiki held up her free hand.

“We may not have to do anything.”

The group of enforcers passed by the window, giving the widest berth they could to the tank parked outside. A moray eel spirit in a leather jacket led the entourage and cast a wary eye over the interior as the other three enforcers filed in behind her. One of them supported a wounded comrade by the shoulder. Two of the servers, the bartender, and the bouncer crossed the room to meet them. Mayumi strained her hearing. The snatches she gathered shifted to a new tone entirely. There was anger, fear, suspicion — but something more. Something ineffable and delicate.

“The fuck is _ she _ doing here? And a goddamn tank?”

“That tank’s been keeping the Kiega away! And look at these tips!”

“It’s like acceptin’ aid from the enemy!”

“Boss already brought her here!”

“What, tonight? Have you seen her?”

“Shut that goddamn door!”

Keiki beckoned over Pike. “Darling, could I get another Red Spider Lily?”

There was an urgency spread between everyone in the bar. Before the door closed the howls had sounded so close.

“We’ve been sitting here with just our bouncer! This is all they sent you with?”

“You don’t get it, we’re all that made it. This fight’s no good.”

“It’s a goddamn nightmare! They already hit—”

“Boss is all alone out there!”

Mayumi flicked her gaze back to her goddess in time to see her shut her eyes in frustration and mouth _ Fuck. _

“Lady Keiki…” She squeezed her hand. When Keiki opened her eyes they held a dull sorrow.

“If she wanted my help, she’d have asked me.”

“If you want to help her, maybe you should.”

Keiki swallowed, then returned Mayumi’s gaze. The dullness passed and left something shimmering. “I am helping her. She loves this place. She’ll be so happy to know it survived the hunt.”

“Even…” Mayumi glanced surreptitiously at the enforcers and lowered her voice. “—_ unionized?” _

“This is a test of her organization as well, Mayumi. If she’s not a fool she’ll grasp how this can only strengthen her position in the long run.”

Even as they spoke, the servers led the wounded enforcer into the back, the bartender returned to the bar to prepare Keiki’s next cocktail, and the bouncer sat with the remaining enforcers at a window booth. They spoke in loud tones easy for Mayumi to pick up.

“Need a fuckin’ raise after this.”

“She used to pay us in fish.” This from the fairy bouncer.

“Look, money can buy fish.”

“I know, but they were good fish.”

Pike arrived with Keiki’s refill. Her eyes darted frantically between the window, the booth full of enforcers, and her guests. “A-anything else I can get you? While you’re here?”

“Coffee would be lovely,” said Mayumi. “How late does the kitchen stay open?”

“Might be all night,” croaked Pike.

“Well, then I’m still deciding.”

She smiled at Keiki, who slipped her a wink in return. Now that she grasped her goddess’s purpose, their strategy was clear. She would help her nurture this spark into a furnace. The wounded enforcer returned from the back room, sporting a few bandages. There was a lull in conversation at the enforcers’ table at their return.

“Podruga,” asked Mayumi, raising her voice slightly. “What’s the current concentration of Keiga forces between here and Kiketsu headquarters?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see an equally surreptitious attempt at eavesdropping from the suddenly-nonchalant enforcers.

“From our last reports, their line is most porous at 1300 West. A small force could perhaps slip through there.”

The moray stood and looked over her bandaged enforcer. “You can still fight?”

“I’m good for a few more.”

The moray gave a needle-toothed grin, then reached down and tousled behind the bouncer’s fox ears. “You keep our girls safe here, now. We’re movin’ out.”

The group left into a lull in the cacophony. It sounded as though the howls were distant once more, and tapering in frequency. Palpable relief spread amongst the bar’s workers.

“Oh, well done, darling,” said Keiki.

Pike brought over the coffee. “Um. _ Thank you,” _ she whispered.

“Thank you,” said Mayumi. “I think I’ve settled on the black garlic ramen.”

“And the eggplant teriyaki bowl for me,” smiled Keiki. “You know, if any of you need a ride home tonight, we’re happy to help.”

Pike scuttled off enthusiastically. Mayumi took a sip of her coffee, then leaned forward.

“Yours is better,” she whispered.

“Oh, be nice, darling,” Keiki laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> saki shoulda been a centaur. there's literally no reason for her to not be a centaur. i made her a centaur. it's important


	10. Entrust This World to Idols

Breaking a siege was one thing for her massive body. Breaking an egg was another. Yachie’s breakfast efforts wouldn’t have fared much better in the body fit for the kitchen’s size — that body was down a hand and the pain within it wavered between distracting and debilitating. So she struggled with too-small cookware and too-delicate ingredients. She had broken several yolks already, but it was all going to the same place anyway. She was strongly considering skipping the process of frying them and mixing them with the rice bowl entirely and just downing them whole like a snake.

The elevator chimed, and the Kiketsu lieutenants filed in, looking rather worse for wear.

“Report,” rumbled Yachie.

“We’ve been through worse,” said Uni. Bandages covered a nasty gash along her chest.

“Not _ much _ worse,” said Masu. She was missing a few of her long compliment of teeth, and sported her own bandages. “Outside our strongholds they just corralled our folks into little pockets and...”

“Bastards,” Iwashi spat. Of the three, she looked the least scathed, but only because fur masked her bruises.

“Not to mention structural damages,” Masu continued, slinking to the couch and settling down with a groan. “We’re lucky you got back when you did, boss.”

“So what’s the _ bad _ news?” said Yachie.

Uni helped herself to one of the warm washcloths the matriarch had left out in a basin on the coffee table, draping it over her forehead as she reclined next to Masu. “Saki got away.”

Saki. What was the purpose of appeasing the Keiga matriarch when this was how she’d repay the effort? Why bother when Yachie’s best efforts would always read as pretense to her? She almost couldn’t blame Saki. How many of Yachie’s efforts were pretense after all?

“It was all I could do to clip her wings,” Yachie sighed. “I was not in a position to kill her. I count it a victory that I removed her from the hunt.”

“She’s not gonna drop it,” said Masu. “If they hit us again like that…”

“What’s our strategy, Miss Kicchou?” asked Iwashi. She had crawled onto the counter to help her crack an egg properly.

“Do you know what she called me?” said Yachie. She twiddled a spatula between her thumb and foreclaw irritably. “She called me Haniyasushin’s lapdog. But if that were true, we’d at least have the benefits of the Primate Garden’s protection.”

“Must be nice to have tanks,” Uni chuckled roughly.

“That’s not out of the question,” said Yachie. “I think it’s high time we consider a new alliance.”

“Ally? With Haniyasushin?” Masu looked between the matriarch and her fellow lieutenants. “Am I the only one who _ didn’t _ see this coming?”

“She’s been a mess over her,” Uni laughed, nudging Masu in the ribs.

“I want to try her breakfasts again!” said Iwashi. The otter spirit laid out three more bowls on the counter.

“Well, we wouldn’t have to worry about the Keiga anymore,” muttered Masu. “Boss, that’s the other bit of news from last night. It’s about Bar Dunkleosteus.”

Yachie picked up another egg from the carton and steeled herself for a grim accounting. “How bad were they hit?”

“They weren’t, at all. I thought it was fishy, and it turns out Haniyasushin and her General parked a goddamn tank outside and had themselves a night of it. Heard from some of the gals who broke through the line.”

There was a strange fluttering within her as she released the tension. She was expecting far worse. “I suppose that’s case in point.”

“No, that was the shot,” said Masu. “Here’s the chaser: now the bar girls got a list of demands. Sayin’ they don’t wanna work unless we meet ‘em. Right after we were hit!”

Yachie’s claws pierced through the shell.

Masu leaned forward from the couch to look up into the kitchen. “You want we should send some gals over—”

“No, Masu. Have them submit their demands in writing. I’ll look them over later.”

“B-boss!?” the gharial sputtered. “You sure?”

Yachie turned a calculating eye to her. “I’m sure of one thing: they _ survived. _ If there’s strength to be gained from that then I want it analyzed and adapted.”

Masu threw up her claws and sank back against the couch but made no further protest. Iwashi doled out portions of rice to the bowls for Yachie to top with eggs.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of negotiating ahead of you,” said Uni. “Guess it can’t always be from a position of strength.”

“Don’t worry, lieutenant.” Yachie picked up her own bowl and tilted its contents to her maw in a single bite. “I’m well aware of my strengths.”

———

Yet again Yachie found herself led through the glowing tunnels of the Primate Garden by the sculptor goddess’s cherished officer. It had been such a regular occurrence before she had turned the titan against her. It was almost a relief to be visiting her again, but the purpose of Yachie’s visit weighed upon her. It blended anticipation with a restless uncertainty at how her proposal might change things between them.

She had focused on the elements she could control to make as appealing a proposition as possible. For her audience, Yachie sported a regal blue cheongsam that accentuated her physique — backless, though the same was true most items of her wardrobe to accommodate her shell. A heavy leather jacket draped over her shoulders and shell more for aesthetic than for warmth. She kept her arms from its sleeves. The total effect of her outfit, she felt, was somewhat lessened by the fact that her right arm was in a sling.

“Did you enjoy yourself at my bar last night, General?” she asked of her escort. Mayumi sported a new bit of regalia today, a gold-trimmed half-cape with dress epaulets. Perhaps she had been promoted again.

“Oh, it’s yours?” said Mayumi, glancing back with a faint smile. “We must have gone on a day you weren’t working there.”

Yachie bit back a barbed response. This was not the time to be undiplomatic, and the pain of her injury brought such responses far too readily to her mind. They walked in silence to the sanctum. Keiki sat at her drafting table, focused entirely on some fanciful new design. For a moment, she seemed almost oblivious to Yachie’s presence as Mayumi led her into the domestic partition. The goddess spoke without turning.

“There’s coffee on the table.”

“Keiki Haniyasushin—” Yachie began. There were any number of things Yachie wanted to say to the Idola Deus. She had considered scripting something, rehearsing a speech to make her intentions clear. Between her injury and the sight of the goddess so charmingly consumed in her craft, charcoal on her fingertips and clay on her apron, she knew such efforts would have been fruitless. Keiki turned as Yachie spoke. Her eyes widened and she gasped.

“What on earth happened to you?”

Yachie winced. She knew there was a livid bruise across her brow. She had hoped it made her look roguish. “Miss Kurokoma happened. If it makes you feel any better, I bit off her arm.”

Keiki blanched. “No, it doesn’t. Come on, let’s take a look at you.”

She gathered her own mug and the mug she had set out for Yachie and led her to a small table on the foundry floor. Yachie seated herself on a stool and unslung her arm as Keiki gathered up her necessary tools.

“Good to see you’ve been taking care of yourself,” said Yachie.

“I wish I could say the same for you, darling,” said Keiki. She started sketching out a glyph on the table. “This is a nullity glyph. It will disable function to your arm while it’s kept in it.”

“This is something of an extreme circumstance,” said Yachie. She rested her broken arm inside the glyph’s completed contours and felt nothing. The numbness was a relief this time, rather than the herald of bodily catastrophe.

“You could’ve brought your other body. Then we wouldn’t have had to bother with this contrivance.”

“I still haven’t quite worked out the thaumaturgical logistics of flight for that one,” admitted Yachie. She sipped her coffee as a distraction from Keiki’s ministrations. She was torn between a queasy, empty sense of bodily disruption and a genuine fascination at the internal workings of her cybernetics.

“I could’ve sent a boat,” said Keiki. “You can ask me for accommodations. Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t just fix this yourself.”

The matriarch sighed. “The last time I tampered with one of your designs I started melting my insides to slag.” She had meant it to sound casual. She had thought that with the pain removed, it would be simpler to control her inflection.

Keiki paused, dremel in hand, and looked up. “The fire breath?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes shone with concern. “Oh, darling.”

“I’ve grasped just enough of your code to be able to make an absolute mess of things,” Yachie rumbled.

Keiki laughed ruefully. She resumed her repairs. Yachie took another sip of her coffee. She had missed her coffee.

“What did you want to say?” asked Keiki. Yachie had thought her to be fully absorbed in repairs. “Earlier, when you came in.”

Yachie took several breaths to marshall herself. “Keiki Haniyasushin. I have come to you today to propose an alliance between the Kiketsu family and the Primate Garden.”

“Skipping truce entirely, I see. Bold as usual.” She set down a delicate spanner and fished around for a properly-size cog on a nearby tray. “What do you hope to gain?”

“Bluntly: survival. My family cannot withstand a protracted war with the Keiga. I cannot simply wait for their next attack.”

She kept her gaze to the work. “And what do you suppose we gain from this proposal?”

“You haven’t dreamed of having your own wing for dedicated clandestine operations?”

“You assume we don’t have one already.”

Yachie leaned forward. “I _ know _ you don’t have one. It’s an operational deficiency my Kiketsu could handily compensate for.”

“Look away, darling.” Keiki donned a welding mask and sparked a welder to life. Yachie leaned back again and closed her eyes.

“How many vulnerabilities have I found in your operations, Keiki? I could simply inform you of them, rather than striking at them.”

“You understand what our purpose in the Beast Realm is, do you not? I don’t mean that in grand philosophical terms. I mean the specific material aims of my organization.”

“You’re in the business of liberation, you say.”

“We are not _ in the business _ of liberation, Yachie. We are its vanguard, against which your families have thrashed bodily. You have made peace with this purpose? You would share in it?”

“If these are the necessary terms of our alliance.”

The flash of the welder subsided, but light still glowed through Yachie’s closed lids and membranes. Feeling and function returned to her arm — as if it had never shattered. She cracked a lid to find the glyph dispelled. Keiki stowed her tools. The glow was that of her aura, building upon itself like a storm on the horizon.

“Yachie, when was the last time you saw the world of the living? Not that charming little bubble Miss Kirisame is from. The material world.”

The centuries of struggle in this purgatory blended together in Yachie’s memories. She tested the movements of her repaired claw. “I don’t remember.”

“There are vast and terrible systems of oppression and bondage that encircle it. Engines of suffering and extraction for the benefit of the vanishing few born into privilege. Constructs of unimaginable cruelty layered over and far beyond the mere categories of predator and prey, the natural processes of selection and adaption. You have tasted some of these systems, I know.”

Keiki stood.

“Because _ you brought them here. _ You replicated them beyond death, Yachie! You and your families, you ensured the chains would stretch into the afterlife! Do you know the despair that howled in the souls of the human spirits, Yachie? When even _ death _ was no release from subjugation? Do you grasp the monumental sin in which you and your people are complicit?”

“I—”

What could she say? That for the longest time the Beast Realm was bloody-fanged atomized survival? That the families had succeeded by simply offloading that suffering onto the weakest among them? They had even thrived, for a time. Could she voice how it sickened her now? How empty a sentiment in the crushing weight of all she had wrought. Keiki knew that history and cleft it into dust it with her purpose, her very presence, her trajectory through the Beast Realm. Her aura blazed like a comet’s tail.

There were a thousand justifications clamoring within her and none of them could withstand the fury of the Idola Deus. Not from all her schemes had Keiki ever wielded this righteous, cold science against her. This was the fury she sought to join herself to. It was a _ better way. _ She took several breaths.

“I will not deny my history nor the history of my family. I can only pledge myself to you and your purpose. To tear down that monument.”

“Would you? Do you?”

“I would. I do.” Yachie stood. She broke her gaze to look at her own claws, held before her. Given to her, made hers. She clenched them, felt her clawtips press against her scaled palms. She looked back to Keiki. “I want a body to tear it all down. I pledge myself to you.”

A smile, faint but warm, played across Keiki’s face. She stepped around the table and slid her hands around Yachie’s claws. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Very well. Matriarch Yachie Kicchou, I have received your proposal for an alliance and I am open for negotiations.”

It was something like a yes. It was a hunger for the ongoing process of atonement. It was hope, shimmering within her. She leaned her head down and rested her forehead against Keiki’s, feeling the warmth of her skin through the fabric of her wrap and the cushion of her hair. She closed her eyes and breathed in the familiar scent of the goddess.

“I think I would like to be friends,” she said.

“Oh?” Keiki chuckled. “Is this your opening pitch?”

“We’ve already made for strange bedfellows,” said Yachie. “How many of these negotiations are a formality?”

“You’d be wise not to discount formality, darling. We haven’t settled on a venue for the ceremony, after all.”

“The… alliance ceremony.”

“Yes!”

Yachie pulled back and gave her friend a cunning smile. “I’m told that Miss Hakurei has an onsen at that shrine of hers.”

———

True moonlight spilled on her skin through the steam. The taste of sake still danced with her forked tongue. The air was like honey. The geothermal pools would have been too shallow for her massive body, and traveling was easier when she could fly with a group. The ceremony had been brief and largely an excuse for a trip to the Hakurei onsen. She basked in the heat and held her silence.

Keiki, her new ally, sat at her side, engaged in conversation with a youkai she had never seen before.

“It just seems to me, from an outsider’s perspective, that the spell card system you’ve implemented appears largely to be a structure in favor of the status quo,” said the sculptor goddess.

“Oh?” responded the youkai. She was tall — taller than Yachie, frustratingly — and had an excessive length of hair that gleamed like dull gold in the moonlight. There was an alien presence to her, one whose overall effect was accentuated by the frankly stunning ghost leaning against her in the pool. “Is it so bad to structure a status quo which keeps the strong from crushing the weak outright?”

There were a few such unfamiliar faces in the pools around her, but she wasn’t entirely among strangers. Of course she knew Marisa — the witch had officiated the alliance ceremony with a surprising, if brief, dignity. There was the shrine maiden, since these were her shrine’s springs. There was Iwashi, comforting Uni — Masu had stayed behind to keep operations steady; Uni always got emotional at alliances. There was the Major General chatting with the swordswoman from the Netherworld — presumably Keiki had invited her. But—

“Keiki.”

“I admire its relative bloodlessness, certainly, but — Yes, darling?”

Yachie blinked languidly and leaned back against the rocks. “Who the hell are all these people?”

“You didn’t pay attention to the RSVPs in the slightest, did you? Well of course you know Reimu over there.”

“She also knows I’m not thrilled about a bunch of youkai crowding up my springs again,” Reimu loudly announced.

“Yes, and Youmu and Marisa. I’m the one who introduced them to _ you _, remember?” growled Yachie. “But who’s this?”

“Darling, this is Yukari Yakumo, one of the Sages of Gensokyo,” said Keiki, as if it explained in the slightest what a Sage was doing _ here. _ Yukari maintained an utterly cryptic composure, while her ghostly companion sat forward.

“How did you like the latest sheet set she found you?” the ghost asked Keiki.

“Simply divine, thank you.”

Indignant realization bloomed in Yachie. “She’s your _ supplier?” _

Keiki leaned back against her, augmenting the water’s heat with her warm body. “Why do you think I invited her, darling?”

Yukari returned Yachie’s gaze with an inhuman intensity and a smile as playful as a cat to a vole. “You’d better keep your eye on this one,” she nodded to indicate Keiki. “She’s been importing some _ fascinating _ Outside World literature lately.”

“Noted,” rumbled Yachie, “and charmed. Yachie Kicchou, matriarch of the Kiketsu family. I’d like to keep in touch — I may have some special orders of my own. Who might your lovely companion be?”

The ghost giggled and nestled herself further against Yukari. “Yuyuko Saigyouji, mistress of Hakugyokurou. Princess, but who’s counting?”

“The Yama, Lady Yuyuko,” said Youmu. The half-phantom swordswoman dredged herself out of the pool to sit next to her mistress and cool off.

“Oh, _ her,” _ Yuyuko waved a hand in airy dismissal.

“A pleasure.” Yachie’s head spun from slightly more than the liquor. Princesses and Sages were apparently the sorts of people she could casually meet through the Idola Deus. Who else might have graced this Beast Realm alliance?

“Who’s the youkai accosting your General?” asked Yachie. Across the pool, a youkai with a rather elegant (but thankfully lesser) height and short blonde hair chatted intensely with Mayumi.

Keiki shifted for a better look. “Oh, her? She’s, er—”

“She’s my plus one,” said Marisa, splashing Yachie as she stepped into the pool next to the matriarch and sat down roughly. “Hey Alice, lay off the poor girl!”

Alice blushed, but Mayumi spoke up. “It’s okay, Miss Kirisame, I don’t mind. As I was saying—” she turned back to the tall magician to resume their conversation, “—I really don’t have a soul, it’s true.”

Marisa nudged Yachie in the side. “Don’t let Reimu’s prickly exterior get you down. On the inside, she’s just happy you’re paying the private event rate. Now, if you were to make an extra donation to the shrine’s upkeep—”

Yachie cast her gaze down at Marisa incredulously. “Don’t the onsen fees go directly to the shrine’s upkeep anyway? You’re running a real racket here.”

Marisa scoffed. “It’s tips, c’mon! You’re heartless, Kicchou.”

“And you’re shameless,” said Yachie.

“I think you’re just jealous everyone wants to talk to Keiki and not you. Y’know why I think that is?” asked Marisa with a sly grin. From how she leaned in it was clear she was in her cups. “Because you’re a bastard, Kicchou. I know some real bastards up here but you take the cake and piss on it.”

“Marisa, darling?” asked Keiki.

“Sure, you got style, and taste, and looks, but heat-seeking danmaku? Total bastard maneuver.”

“Marisa,” said Keiki.

“Yeah, Keiki?”

Keiki handed a bill to Yukari, who casually slit a portal through space to drop it directly into the shrine’s donation box.

“Don’t neglect your date.”

Marisa touched the brim of her hat and winked. “Hope you enjoy your time at the Hakurei onsen.”

She half-waded, half-swam to join Alice and Mayumi’s conversation. Yachie gave a dubious look to Keiki.

“You’re encouraging her?”

Keiki pitched her voice for a more personal conversation. “Darling. I’m given to understand that’s Reimu’s food money. Surely you want to keep her fed.”

Yachie wouldn’t begrudge her that but would begrudge the ribbing. She swept her claws open in a facetious gesture. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a _ bastard.” _

With a new opening, Keiki slid herself under the matriarch’s arm and pressed herself closer. Yachie gleaned from her movements and voice that the two of them were each roughly as drunk as the other. “Yes, but you’re _ my _bastard now, so everyone better watch out.”

Yachie chuckled despite herself and freshened both of their sake dishes. The two basked once more in the hush of the springs and the glow of the moon. All night a feeling had been brewing inside her, tender and unspoken. An emotional surety that she was at last equipped with the knowledge and support to make what she wished of her future. Uncertainty without fear. Potential.

Perhaps this was freedom.

Yachie broke the silence softly. “Since you’re using one of the founders of Gensokyo as a bookstore, have you picked up anything I might like?”

“I’m nearly finished with _ What Is To Be Done? _, actually. There’s a bit of historical context you have to piece together yourself but the rhetoric is electrifying and you’ll appreciate the polemics. Written by, ah… one of the Sages of the Outside World, one could say.”

“Well?” rumbled Yachie.

“Mm?” Keiki hummed, turning her face up towards Yachie.

“What _ is _ to be done?”

Keiki laughed and pressed herself upwards into a kiss that promised far more when they had time to themselves again. “Yachie, my dear, you’ll just have to read it to find out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "but ao3 author chimeraproblems," you may ask, "why does the hakurei shrine have hot springs?" well because subterranean animism said the geyser erupted near the hakurei shrine and reimu deserves nice things, like hot springs in walking distance. thank you for reading! study lenin and practice with many cartridges


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